On Jul 23, 2007, at 2:53 AM, rocky wrote:
Hey List, In my office we have 15 PCs. We are doing data entry and website design for some of our clients. All of these services depend heavilly on internet. We are doing almost all of the jobs on the same websites. Unfortunately, our network is not stable at all sometimes it is extramly slow. Therefore, I'm thinking of use my Debian Etch box as squid proxy server. In order to achieve this I have done the following configuration to my Debian box. 1, Set up the Debian box serve as Local DNS server. When configure the internet access for the other office PCs, I put my IP address( 192.168.1.55) as their primary DNS server. 2. Aptitude installed squid and in the squid.conf file set http_port 192.168.1.55:3128. Can any of you give me some your insight regarding to my configuration please? Is DNS and squid set up a solution? What I could do to make the Debian box become the magic box which can accelerate our network speed?
Squid will probably help if you do a lot of web browsing on those PCs.There's more you'll have to do in squid.conf to get everything working. You'll need to set up ACLs to allow your clients to connect to the squid cache. This is explained pretty well in the FAQ.
You'll also need to tell the web browsers on the PCs to use Squid as an HTTP proxy. Since you only have 15 of them it's probably easiest to just configure them by hand; but if you decide to go with auto- configuration, I might be able to help since I was just setting this up myself.
If you're running a local nameserver make sure you either point /etc/ resolv.conf on the server to it, or tell Squid to use it by putting something like "dns_nameservers 127.0.0.1" in the configuration file. This will improve speed, by adding a layer of DNS caching. Besides, strange things can happen if the cache and the clients don't get the same results from DNS lookups.