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

[William Fragakis <william@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

the default install of k12ltsp includes squid (you don't have to run the
server as a terminal server)

If you want an easy squid install, that might be a good way to do it.
Pop in a few disks and you are done. 

There are probably other, even lighter weight distros and packages that
include it as default but I can't remember the ones off the top of my
head.

regards,
William Fragakis
morrisbrandon.com
On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 23:43 +1000, Alan E. Davis wrote:
> 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
> > ----
> > Online Grades
> > http://onlinegrades.sf.net/
> >