Proxy Servers

[Michael Tibor]

> On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, John F. wrote:
> 
> > > 
> > > Are other libraries using a proxy server that requires username/passwords?
> > > How have provided the instructions for changing browser options?  
> > > 
> > Hi y'all.  Sorry I was gone for a while.  I finally got our e-mail 
> > set up here at the library.  
> > 
> > We are using Wingate.  It does not require names and passwords and it 
> > is very easy to use.  It is far better than any proxy that I have 
> > seen and it only costs $700 for an unlimited user site license.  I am 
> > very happy with it.  
> 
> For folks on a budget and not afraid of being a little adventuresome and
> learning a little bit of (admittedly a touch arcane) UNIX, there is no
> better proxy than the combination of Apache in proxy mode with SOCKS and
> ipfwadm doing the firewalling, running on Linux.
> 
> For those following this thread, I believe I posted earlier (or maybe I
> initiated it?  dunno) asking how to do adequate proxy filtering under
> Apache -- I believe now I have it solved by using ipfwadm and SOCKS and
> handling filtering from outside the proxy server.  I'll know for sure next
> week when I travel to the site to check it out.
> 
> If you have an adequate member of your library systems department or if
> you yourself have the skills to pay the bills in the UNIX world, this
> solution can't be beat.  It only costs $0 for the operating system, $0 for
> the server, and $0 for the firewall, and I'll wager that you could do this
> quite easily with that aging 486 in the corner.  Your equipment cost
> for this excellent solution could very well turn out to be zero dollars in
> total, not including tax.
> 
> -- john f., miami u library systems

For our public Internet machines I started out with the Linux+Apache to
provide proxy services, mainly for the caching advantages.

It wasn't long before I discovered a free package called Squid, and
decided to go with that instead.  Squid is much more powerful than the
Apache proxy module in many ways, including its use of Access Control
Lists for site filtering.  We're currently only using this to comply with
licensing issues, but it should work wonderfully with more complex
filtering policies.  There are also perl scripts which will generate usage
statistics--something that is proving more and more useful every day. 

Squid is available at:

   http://squid.nlanr.net/Squid/

Oh-- I should probably also mention that we have been running the above
setup for over a year on a spare 486-66 with 16MB ram.  Total cost, as
John mentioned above was $0.

Mike
-- 
Mike Tibor        University of Alaska Anchorage    (907) 786-1001 voice
LAN Technician    Consortium Library                (907) 786-6050 fax
http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/~tibor/    mailto:tibor at lib.uaa.alaska.edu
Finger tibor at asimov.lib.uaa.alaska.edu for PGP public key