A good topic! I 'discovered' transparent proxies recently when I was trying to resolve a problem I had obtaining security patches from security.debian.org via http. Other than having recently changed to cable broadband via Telstraclear, nothing (including apt sources) was altered, yet I was getting timeouts. After a couple of weeks of this, I eventually provided a comparison of latency output from 'ping' vs 'hping' to security.debian.org before the call was tacitly acknowledged and the problem silently fixed. I agree with Joe that they are an overhead when it comes to managing exceptions. -- Colin Templeman Security Analyst IT Risk and Security New Zealand Post Ltd This email with any attachments is confidential and may be subject to legal privilege. If it is not intended for you please reply immediately, destroy it and do not copy, disclose or use it in any way.