Hardware for squidguard

[dwmatteson]

Hi all --

(I posted this in the proxy server forum, but it seems to be a slow week in there, so I thought I'd give it a try here.) I'm looking at setting up a RedHat Linux 7.2-based squid proxy server with squidguard for a relatively small network. I'm mostly interested in content filtering (we run children's programs, so we need to block out adult content as best we can), not so much proxy service, but I can't seem to figure out just how much muscle I'll need. What I've seen in the documentation has been sort of vague or describing the needs for an environment somewhat more demanding than mine.

I'm working with a network consisting of about 200 machines having Internet access over 256K DSL. Naturally, not all of these machines will be on or accessing the Internet all of the time (I'd estimate no more than 40-50% usage at peak times), but I'd like to figure out a worst-case scenario.

I'm in a not-for-profit environment with an IT budget of $0, so I'm looking to see if it's feasible to do anything with what I've got floating around right now.

Thanks in advance for any help/pointers/advice.

Don

 

[pcunix]

Well, figure your web page throughput. How much data will be coming down the pipe? How much read from the hard drives?

http://pcunix.com/Books/webperf.html

reviews a book on web server performance tuning; as you'll be running a proxy server this is appropriate.

Tony Lawrence
SCO Unix/Linux Resources

http://pcunix.com

tony@pcunix.com

 

[tchaser]

I have recently performed this configuration on a RedHat 7.2 install. You need to specify the redirector to point to the squidGuard executable and your squidGuard.conf file. This should be in your specified in your squid.conf file. I have had success in doing this and it works quite well. If you would like I can dig out my configuration file and post it. One area that I was trying to get it to only allow certain hosts to access only one or two specific sites and the rest to be able to be filtered freely by squidGuard. I was unsuccessful in this. I don't believe that you were attempting this last item so I think my configuration should work. This is one line you will need redirect_program /usr/sbin/squidGuard -c /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf . The next one is redirect_children 4 . If you use a minimal configuration in squid.conf and add this to the end you should be in business. I hope this helps.