ICAP support

ICAP is the acronym for Internet Content Adaptation Protocol The purpose of the feature is to offload work that would normally take place on the firewall to a separate server specifically set up for the specialized processing of the incoming traffic. This takes some of the resource strain off of the FortiGate firewall leaving it to concentrate its resources on things that only it can do.

Offloading value-added services from Web servers to ICAP servers allows those same web servers to be scaled according to raw HTTP throughput versus having to handle these extra tasks.

ICAP servers are focused on a specific function, for example:

• Ad insertion
• Virus scanning
• Content translation
• HTTP header or URL manipulation
• Language translation
• Content filtering

ICAP does not appear by default in the GUI. You must enable it in System > Feature Select to display ICAP in the GUI.

The following topics are included in this section:

• The Protocol
• Offloading using ICAP
• Configuration Settings
• Example ICAP sequence
• Example Scenario