[plug] List newbie asks dumb question - SQUID for home use?

[leon at brooks.smileys.net]

On 11 Nov, David Buddrige wrote:
> SQUID is a Proxying program that also cache's... the reason I am using 
> it is:

> a. RAM is plentiful on my intended proxy server (my 486) (SQUID cache's 
> as much data as possible in electonic RAM rather than purely being on 
> disk - hence increasing speed dramatically, but at the cost of high RAM 
> usage)
> b. Since my wife usually goes to the same sites repeatedly (hotmail, 
> amazon, transperth and white-pages), it makes it faster for her if they 
> are cached locally rather than being downloaded fresh each time.

Uh, HotMail..., yes... you might want to do a couple of things with
that. First, redirect http://home.microsoft.com to your local
web-server, for when she logs out, or maybe to the thing that she
usually does after HotMail; second, set up "standard-violating" cacheing
measures on your Squid (ie cache normally uncacheable things), since MS
and everyone who worship it tend to server much of their static
"non-cacheable"; third, maybe also redirect doubleclick.com etc to
local "advert" bitmaps, thereby averting even the header checks for
these. Because you're not an ISP, you won't offend anyone of you do
these things. (-: