Since you often use your phone away from your home or business Wi-Fi networks, you may want to peek behind the firewall at your home or business and see if things are running smoothly. This is possible with PVProxy. In networking parlance, 'proxy' is a service that can route messages between computers. In this context, 'proxy' refers to the free PVProxy program.
When PVProxy is running on an internet server, ProbeView can 'forward' various requests to it; these requests are executed directly on the remote server, so "local" addresses and domain names can be tested.
PVProxy is a free program available from GroupWyse.com for both The Mac OS X and Windows platforms. It is a simple web server that accepts textual (URL-encoded) requests to perform 'pinging' and other test operations and returns the results to the caller.
If all the targets you want to test are directly available on the internet, you don't need a proxy. However, if a target is behind a firewall, installing PVProxy on a machine behind that firewall can allow you to safely test anything visible to the machine on which the proxy is running.
To specify a proxy in ProbeView, you need the host name or IP address of the server running PVProxy, the port number you assigned to the service and an optional password.
A proxy is uniquely identified by its address and port number. You can use a proxy for any ping type. Once you've specified a proxy you can use it for any targets you choose.
A "proxy extension" is a special type of test that users can construct by extending the free PVProxy program (available from the GroupWyse.com website). An extension uses a unique string, called a 'token', that identifies the extension. For more information, see the Proxy Extensions help page.
The free PingView program is a more sophisticated version of ProbeView that runs on Windows computers. It can handle up to hundreds of targets. You can connect PingView to PVProxy and monitor the results of its scans using the full version of ProbeView.