Best reverse proxy for IIS 6?

Question

I want to set up a reverse proxy from one of our intranet IIS sites to point to another tomcat server. Eg, i want the user to browse to 'http://our-iis-server/friendly-url' and for it to reverse proxy to 'http://our-tomcat-server/ugly-url'.

What would be the best solution for this? I've narrowed it down to three options:

• http://www.managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/documentation.aspx
• http://www.isapirewrite.com/
• http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF

Also, can these tools rewrite the links in the html? Eg, if the tomcat server's html has something like 'a href = http://our-tomcat-server/ugly-url/product/widget' i would need it to change to 'a href = http://our-iis-server/friendly-url/product/widget'

Thanks in advance. All good answers will be voted for!!!

Answer 1

IIRF is good and free. However, it's not a reverse proxy - not yet anyway. [as of March 2010, IIRF can act as a Reverse Proxy] It's the equivalent of Apache's mod_rewrite, and you need mod_proxy.

It looks like Helicon ISAPI Rewrite 3.0 supports proxying as well as URL rewriting.

Free options include Apache on Windows, or you can also run Squid as a proxy server. The canonical Microsoft answer is ISA Server.