phunni Posted April 7, 2003 Report Share Posted April 7, 2003 I currently have a setup where, one basic spec machine runs a firewall and shares it's internet connection and printer with my network. I have recently wondered about whether or not it would be a good idea t orun a proxy (such as squid) on this server as well. I'm not 100% sure of the implications of this however. Would a low spec machine be able to run a proxy server (Pentium, 32MB RAM)? Also, are there any issues considering that most of my desktop software that could make use of a proxy is already configured - will it be nightmare to go through and individually re-configure everything? Any thoughts or advice that anyone has on this would be appreciated Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michel Posted April 7, 2003 Report Share Posted April 7, 2003 I've not setup one myself, but I'll try to give some commenst as far as my knowledge of it goes.... Would a low spec machine be able to run a proxy server (Pentium, 32MB RAM)? Also, are there any issues considering that most of my desktop software that could make use of a proxy is already configured - will it be nightmare to go through and individually re-configure everything? Well, your proxy will do normally do all your internetconnections...., the question is maybe, can squid run on it?Look if there are minimum requirements for squid. If you can run it and a lot of people on your network acces the same pages,...squid will give a boost toit, because the pages only have to be transferred over the lan...maybe squid first does a checdk if teh pages aren't outdated, but it will be much faster and your ineternetconnection can be sooner used for something else... If you can install squid, you should also see if you like SquidGuard, it's got some securityfeatures: http://www.squidguard.org/ squidGuard can be used to limit the web access for some users to a list of accepted/well known web servers and/or URLs only. block access to some listed or blacklisted web servers and/or URLs for some users. **) block access to URLs matching a list of regular expressions or words for some users. **) enforce the use of domainnames/prohibit the use of IP address in URLs. **) redirect blocked URLs to an "intelligent" CGI based info page. **) redirect unregistered user to a registration form. redirect popular downloads like Netscape, MSIE etc. to local copies. redirect banners to an empty GIF. **) have different access rules based on time of day, day of the week, date etc. have different rules for different user groups. and much more.. Because you're already on a network and have to distribute internet already, you won't have any extra problems I think, the computer must be fast enough to run squid and to handle the internetconnections....I think it will just give a boost to your internetconnections, the programs won't have more problems(any?) as before.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyv Posted April 7, 2003 Report Share Posted April 7, 2003 I currently have a setup where, one basic spec machine runs a firewall and shares it's internet connection and printer with my network. I have recently wondered about whether or not it would be a good idea t orun a proxy (such as squid) on this server as well. I'm not 100% sure of the implications of this however. Would a low spec machine be able to run a proxy server (Pentium, 32MB RAM)? Also, are there any issues considering that most of my desktop software that could make use of a proxy is already configured - will it be nightmare to go through and individually re-configure everything? Any thoughts or advice that anyone has on this would be appreciated I would say you would be pushing it with only 32mb of ram, it also depends on the amount of clients. Do you have another server? you could put the proxy on a more beefy machine, it doesn't have to be on the firewall at all. It's simple to setup mozilla clients to use the proxy. edit -> preferences -> advanced -> proxies -> http proxy slap in the ip of the proxy and the port number (which a can't remember of the top of my head). Shut down mozilla and restart it, done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted April 8, 2003 Author Report Share Posted April 8, 2003 I think I've come to the conclusion that my machine will not be up to the job - although there will only be a maximum of four users trying to connect. There are other services run on the server that will also use memory. I don't really want to use another machine on the network as the whole point of my getting and installing tyhe machine I use as a server is that ot can just be left running and evertything will work - I don't want to have to do that with my other machines Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyv Posted April 8, 2003 Report Share Posted April 8, 2003 Oh well, if you can more ram in the future it may become an option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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