Re: [school-discuss] On site cache of web pages

[Sam Snow <snowsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alan,

I helped at a 500 student (PreK through grade 12) school that had 144kb 
IDSL connection for several years. Running a local cache was very helpful!

What we used was IPCOP ( http://www.ipcop.org/ ) and then used the 
included squid cache in transparent mode. As you describe your 
situation, IPCOP might or might not work the best for you if you are 
only wanting to cache one department's computers. It is really meant to 
be inserted between your regular network and the outside world, so that 
all traffic would pass through the IPCOP machine. However, maybe it 
could be still be used for what you are describing.

The IPCOP web interface includes nice graphs that show how much traffic 
is incoming and outgoing at any time of the day. It also has graphs 
showing how much of the traffic is being served by the cache. We ran the 
squid cache in transparent mode so that nothing had to be set up on the 
school computers.

I don't know if your school currently has any internet content 
filtering, but we also used the Cop+ add-on for IPCOP, which added 
"Dansguardian", a web filtering program that is free for use by schools 
and non-profits. The add-on for IPCOP can be downloaded from 
http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/cop.html and 
http://home.earthlink.net/~copplus/ .

DG allows for lots of flexibility regarding what is blocked. Sites or 
portions of web sites can be blocked and unblocked from either the 
command line or the web interface. If you really wanted to crack down on 
outgoing traffic from the internal network something like the Block Out 
Traffic add-on can be used ( http://blockouttraffic.de/ ), which makes 
you set up a rule to allow for any outing traffic to the internet from 
your internal network. This can be used to disable file sharing 
programs, IM traffic, etc.

If you have any other questions about setting up IPCOP or the COP+ 
add-on I have done it several times. Feel free to ask.

Sam
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Online Grades
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