OT: Cache Server side-effects

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

The university where I work is how I get access to the internet. Over 
the Christmas holidays I noticed that my attempts at upgrading my Debian 
box via apt-get suddenly went from a process that took roughly four 
hours to taking four days. What is going on?!

Then yesterday I learned that the university had installed a web cache 
server in order to provide cached web pages to people on campus, so that 
if one person went to www.espn.com, and then someone else went there a 
few minutes later, the second person would get a cached copy of the espn 
page, thus saving wear and tear on the internet-at-large. I mentioned 
that it may not be related, but that's the same time frame when my 
apt-get upgrades started taking extremely long, and timing out multiple 
times. Another person in the group said that he had started seeing the 
same behaviour on Windows boxes using the ms-update feature.

So my questions:
   1) Does anyone have experience enough with caching servers to 
verify/deny that it is causing the problems?
   2) Are there any client-side settings that I can make on my Debian 
boxes to bypass the cache server?
   3) If the caching server is causing the problems, is it due to a 
misconfiguration, or is it just the nature of a caching server, and 
there's nothing that can be done about it short of disabling it entirely?

Thanks!

Kent