nixCraft

Hi Vivek and team,

I run an education centre for about 45 students. I have 50 machines, 5 of which I use as servers. One is a DHCP server (FC5) while the others run some content management tools. I have a windows xp machine which hosts a 2 Mbps ADSL connection from BSNL. I want to share this connection across LAN for the students. I have some questions which need to be answered before I can proceed:

1. Currently I am using Analog X proxy tool to share internet across LAN. Can I use squid here or should I just forward packets from LAN interface to Internet Interface ?
2. Can squid be hosted on a machine (Linux) other than the internet gateway machine (Xp)?
3. Can I use Bittorrent through squid?
4 .What other things should I keep in mind while sharing internet across LAN?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. I am a complete newbie to networking and server stuff, so please bear with me.

Thanks.

/raghuram

You can use squid with Linux. You can setup Linux as router and squid as caching server:
Squid only works on Linux and not on XP. If you have router from BSNL you can use it with Linux. USB modem may not work with Linux.

No squid is only http/ftp proxy. If you setup Linux as router you can use bittorent via Linux box.

Security

If you have any question please feel to reply back.

__________________
Vivek | My personal blog
Linux Evangelist
Play hard stay cool

thank you Vivek. That sure did clear up some lingering doubts. As for security, how do I ensure that my boxen are safe, especially the squid/Linux Router box?

raghuram

Basically you need to install iptables based firewall and only run required services.

__________________
Vivek | My personal blog
Linux Evangelist
Play hard stay cool

In the squid tutorial available on this site, I didn't come across the 'caching' part of squid. Do I have to explicitly make squid a caching server? Also, I want to allow only 10 IPs to access the net while the rest are blocked. How do I do that?

Thanks.

raghuram