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

Thank you for these helpful responses.

We are currently behind a firewall; I'm not sure we need to get too
much heavier with something like ipcop.  Our main interest at this
point is for students to be able to access science sites within a
reasonable time.  There is one other issue that might be useful to ask
about---streaming video.

I have found it problematical to view streaming videos that would be
extremely useful for my classes.  I have been looking for a way to
save them on my machine at night, and show them during the day.
Apparently our firewall renders it difficult, if not impossible, to
view these streaming feeds at all.  They are Real media, at least the
ones I am thinking of.  Other bandwidth sensitive science demos will
also be interesting to store on our cache.

The docs for squid are a bit daunting for me, and I'm not sure how to
start.  Perhaps we can just use a single machine for a demonstration
of concept setup; perhaps using a wireless router in our building.
Even with slow HDDs the access would be a lot better than our current
bottleneck.  I am interested at this point in just caching
pages/files, and not in firewall filtering as such.

Thanks again,

Alan Davis

On 6/5/06, Sam Snow <snowsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
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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