Building your own web cache box?

[synaesthesia]

Is this possible/feasible?

 

I'm guessing so, as most of the web cache boxes provided by BT or whoever else are little more than optical driveless low end PCs. If so, is there a particular peice of software or OS I should be looking at?

 

Just a medium sized primary is starting to struggle with video performance when they want the whole suite accessing videos from, for example BBC at the same time, due to their broadband performance it's not quite good enough, and murders the rest of the network at the same time.

 

We've a couple of spare P4 3ghz units lying around, I'm sure I can find some RAM to fill them to the hilt, and they've got gigabit network ports in.

 

So, any recommendations gratefully received

[powdarrmonkey]

Squid on Ubuntu or Debian, I would suggest. Assuming you don't want anything complex like authentication, just a caching proxy, this is the most straightforward solution (IMO).

[dhicks]

any recommendations gratefully received

 

As mentioned, use Squid. You'll need to compile your own to support transparent proxying, so you might as well use Debian rather than Ubuntu.

 

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David Hicks

[tom_newton]

If it is just caching, transparent proxying may be ok.

Just watch out though in case something upstream of this box is doing any kind of authentication, you may run into bother - so think carefully about where you stick it.

 

Squid/ubuntu is a fine choice tho.

[synaesthesia]

Great, cheers all - very familiar with Ubuntu and will take a good look at Squid.

There's no authentication involved, just connection via EMBC's proxy. I'll double check with our own networking guys where in the system it'd be best to stick it

[dhicks]

Just watch out though in case something upstream of this box is doing any kind of authentication, you may run into bother

 

Just to clarify, in case people haven't come accross this problem before: if you use any kind of external system away on the Internet that a whole class logs on to at a time, and you have a cache between you and the Internet, the cache can sometimes be a bit slow / screwy and give the site the wrong cookie details, i.e. the whole class winds up having only one cookie shared between them. The fix is generally to set some kind of bypass on your cache for those particular sites that you use that use cookie-based authentication.

 

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David Hicks