
Squid Proxy Server
To be able to cache HTTP and FTP requests made from inside your LAN to the
Internet, you will need to set up a proxy server on your firewall. This would permit a page to be requested by two different users to be retrieved only once from the Internet, thus dramatically fastening
access to this page while saving bandwidth.
Mandrake security has chosen the proxy server Squid. The latter acts as an
agent, accepting requests from clients (such as browsers) and passing
them on to the appropriate Internet server. It then stores a copy of the
returned data in an on-disk cache.
Choose between four options before going on to the next step:
-
deactivate the proxy server: If you choose not to use the proxy, requests
from users will be directly forwarded to the outside.
-
activate transparent proxy: Activates the proxy and configures it to
act as a transparent proxy, i.e. users will not need to
configure their clients to enable them to use the proxy: all requests are
automatically intercepted and managed by the proxy.
-
activate manual proxy: Same as previous, but client web browsers will
need to be reconfigured to explicitly use the proxy server
installed on your MandrakeSecurity server.
-
activate manual proxy with user level authentication: Same as previous.
WARNING: create accounts on the firewall linux box for the users who are authorized to connect to the net.