Options for Fast squid setup??

what i'm saying is, you might look at getting an old p3 or p4 server. Most of them are PERFECT for this, as they come with 2 onboard gigabit nics (or at the very least they have pci-x slots which can take a pci-x dual gigabit intel card, which can be had for 15-20 bucks and are highly compatible)

It might be worth looking at whole servers, the reason i say this is, sometimes, you can find them QUITE cheap, and they have high quality parts, while they may be 2...3 maybe 4 generations behind what you'd buy new, they work very well for this sort of thing. most of the 2u servers hold 6 scsi hard drives. Theres also some non-rackmount dell servers that hold 4 scsi drives which are always cheap. It might even be worth looking at old sparc based servers, if they are cheap enough..

Sometimes you can get good deals.
yeah, ebay is being WEIRD right now.
they had a notice up about it, something wrong with thier backend servers



belikeyeshua said:
It would be nice if I could just use a Flash Card (like an SD card) or a fast USB drive as RAM but my guess is that even if that was possible, it would be much slower than actual RAM (which is 333Mhz in my case).

my NAS uses a raid 1 gmirror of compact flash cards to boot off of. I use ZFS on my actual hard drives. Is that what you mean? if so it's very possible.
 
Yes, that was what I was wondering. If I could use SD Cards as Memory and then maybe (somehow) either run the entire OS or just run squid (or something) in the RAM. I've tried to google this but I did not come up with anything.

I was able to do some searching on eBay. I found out that you can still search by searching title and description. I was amazed how cheap 15k scsi drives are, and I think that might be a good option for me.

I actually really like the sound of me just purchasing an entire server. This computer here was given to us by a friend of ours who is a computer geek (like myself). He gave it to me after we got talking about computers and then I mentioned that I was wanting to set up some kind of squid server to help with our cheap internet access.

My dad would much rather have this computer go to good use as a computer for my younger sister to do school on (we home school using Switched On Schoolhouse Computer Software for Windows XP). Even though I'm sure my dad would like faster, more reliable internet, I'm sure he does not want to spend the money on it. And so, I'm usually the 19 year old who spends my own money for things like these that benefit the whole family :D.

Anyhow, if I bought a server, I'm pretty sure my dad would buy this computer from me since he wanted to buy another computer anyway.

Unfortunately, eBay is not cooperating enough for me to be able to do a proper search. Maybe it will be better tomorrow.
 
yah, the only BAD thing about getting a full server is that they can be QUITE loud, depending on what you get, espeically ones around the p4 era because those suckers get HOT. Same with scsi (those faster drives generate more heat) but if you have a closet or a side room somewhere to set up they make great machine. The best thing is, most of them come with 2 nics so you can completely replace your router. Add a pci wifi card, and mayne a cheap network switch and you can run it as a router with squid. That's what i do. My router is running FreeBSD 8.0 rc3 with squid. I use pf as the firewall, but before that when i didn't know as much, i used pfsense which actually had a squid package which made setting everything super easy. Anyways, it's up to you. Everytime i think freebsd can't get any better, i learn something new.
 
Oh wow... I did not even think about it being loud. That would be a big problem.

See, we live in a huge house that is sectioned off. A third of it is our friend's house and a third of it is our house. The modem is in our friend's office where that goes into a crappy Netgear router and then we get wireless internet from that. So, I think if I were to run it transparently, it needs to be Modem --> Squid Server --> Router (or skip the router if I made the server a router) --> Local Computers.

I kind of doubt that Mark would want a really loud computer in his office, to be blaring all day and night. I guess I could just not run it transparently but I really like the idea of configuring it transparently.

At any rate, the PCI wifi card broadcasts the signal instead of receives a signal, right? We actually were looking into buying a newer router, one that would have a much stronger signal and also be faster, but if I could get a good wifi card then I would just use that.
 
no, check it out, you use the server AS the router.

internet => server => network switch => clients


you run pf on the server and set up NAT which allows you to use the server AS a router, then with pf you redirect all outgoing port 80 traffic to squid, which is running on your router. Just set up the router in a closet or office somewhere where noise isn't as much of an issue.

with pci wifi you can run as an access point no problem. My setup is like this:

i have a cable modem coming in, which is hooked to a server with 2 network cards and one pci wifi card. This server acts as a router for my network, the second network card is hooked to a 16 port gigabit switch.

i use 192.168.1.0/24 subnet for my lan (the switch) and 192.168.2.0/24 for my wifi network. Squid runs on the server, which is set to redirect all outgoing http traffic to the squid port (3128)

When i say loud, i don't mean like air conditioner loud, i just mean it's not super quiet like some of the small pc's out there. If it's in an office closet or a room which isn't a bedroom/living room i wouldn't see it as a major nusiance.

as far as running it like a network bridge....i guess you could do that but having your own pf firewall/router is a great use of the extra cpu power you'll have. It's possible to run pf in bridge mode too though I guess it's all in what you want. One of the great things about FreeBSD is it can be set up many different ways
 
Thats what I meant... running the server AS a router. I was trying to say that if I ran the server as a router, then I would get rid of the router.

Anyhow, what kind of specs do you think I'd need to have a wireless router and squid server all in one?

I've been checking out some servers on eBay and it seems that unless they are REALLY old, they are rather pricey. But I'm pretty sure I can find one I need at a decent price.

I did find several SCSI 15k hard drives and I was amazed how cheap they were. Like I could even just buy a lot of two or three 15k drives for $15-$30 or so.

I have to weigh it all out. It seems logical to just go with the computer I already have and get a couple more hard drives, but I'm thinking it would be nice to be able to use this computer here for something else.
 
i would guess a p3 based server would be FINE for what you need (2-10 clients total)

my last server was a p4 based server and it never dropped under 5% cpu usage. now i have an old core2duo based machine and it's huge overkill..i'm probably going to repurpose it. honestly, lots of people use 500 mhz cpu's for routers and they are more than you ever need. serious, look at some of those cheap p3 and p4 based servers (or equivelent) on ebay or craig's list,. I've noticed most of them come stripped of hard drives but like you said, you can get those cheap.

either way,. there is more thna one way to do it.
 
Ive got another question...

Is there any difference (speed wise) from those really fancy gigabit ethernet cards that might come in a server, or the two standard ethernet cards that comes in this computer here?

So, as I understand it... I can have an older Processor because squid does not take up too much, but as for memory and hard drive space... I would want to have a decent amount, right? If thats the case, I might just buy and old p3 or p4 server and add more ram. If its capable of that, that is.
 
belikeyeshua said:
So, as I understand it... I can have an older Processor because squid does not take up too much, but as for memory and hard drive space... I would want to have a decent amount, right? If thats the case, I might just buy and old p3 or p4 server and add more ram. If its capable of that, that is.

I guess you are way too worried about hardware specs.

My router is a P3-700MHz, 768Mb RAM, 30 G ATA HDD, 2 NICs, 1 PCI WiFi card. This machine runs PF, hostapd, Squid (transparent) plus other network services like dhcpd, ntpd, named and freeradius on FreeBSD 7.2 just fine.

Most of the time, it is used by 2-4 users browsing, but I guess even another 10 users would not be any problem, as the machine is ~98% idle at all times, and provides decent speed. Even though I am using squid with a rather large filter list for ad-blocking, which saves a great deal of bandwith.
 
yah, i agree, p3 and p4 boxes make great routers for homes and small offices. It's one of the best things you can do to keep a pc out of the landfill.
 
Oh.... I then what is wrong with me just using what I have and buying a couple SCSI hard drives, a SCSI PCI card and a PCI wifi card?

I think it was DD's first response that made me thing my specs were not good enough.

I'll try to find an old clunker server though. That sounds like a great option... if I can find one locally.
 
No verdict on your hardware was implied. The options you wanted (COSS (which has been removed from Squid 3, I think) and diskd (which is only feasible for busy servers, where the Squid process needs to be unburdened) were simply not applicable to your setup. Indeed, any reasonably modern PC with a bunch of disks will do just fine with ufs/aufs, and combining it with a router/gateway function will hardly add any load.
 
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