Topic: Squid on SME 5.1.2

[Pepe]

Hi all dudes.

I'm running a cybercafe with two phone lines and two sme servers using one modem on each.

It works great! sme it¿s even better than nat32 wich runs in windows but i was wondering if there's any way to improve speed when all the computers are in use (especifically when my customers uses the slow hotmail) and web cache came into my mind.

unfortunatelly there's no other way to connect to internet where i am so it is very important, so all i have to do is configure my workstations IE to use a proxy server on 192.168.x.x:3128? or any of you knows any setting to be made at squid.conf to make it go faster and better?

I really appreciate any suggestion about this, hardware tips, configuration tips, anything would be great

Thanks a lot for reading

Pepe

[Jonathan]

According to the FAQ the proxy is on by default I think!

(source: http://www.e-smith.org/faq.php3#8q31)

From Appendix C of the user manual the following critical note:

In general, we recommend that proxying be disabled in your network applications. Using the proxy server can benefit the organization if you have a slow Internet connection and you've installed your server software on a fast computer. In this case, reading from the hard drive will be faster than reading from the Internet. Remember, though, that a proxy server benefits the second and subsequent visitors to a site but not the first visitor, so this benefit only applies if your users tend to visit the same sites repeatedly.

(source: http://www.e-smith.org/docs/manual/5.1/app-proxysrv.html)

According to appendix C, proxy only solves your problem for pages which are visited more than one time, which is very straight forward. This is not true for hotmail I think because these pages are unique because of safety precautions. I don't know this for sure however, because I tend not to use hotmail.

Good luck!