Linux

We are working in the office where about 5-6 machines have Internet access. We pay for each GB of traffic we consume and that's quite expensive. Almost no worker download files. Just surfing websites (including our corporate one that is located outside of local network thus we pay for accessing it too).

I am thinking of purchasing low-end cheap PC to install SQUID and setup NAT to direct all office internet traffic through it.

Should I expect traffic consumption reduce counted by ISP in this case at all? If yes, what is the estimated factor of bandwidth consumtion reduce? I understand, that that depends on what internet sites are the staff surfs etc etc. I just care about something average coming from someone's practice. Increasing SQUID HDD cache to 10-20Gb is not a big problem I think. HDDs are pretty big and cheap nowadays.

Hi,

quick answer: forget squid. Won't help enough. Probably around 20%.
Better try to "upgrade" the pc-s web browsers, flashblock, adblock, maybe noscript etc but please don't overdo it. Maybe kill yourtube, but usually it is better to get a better network connection, for corporate web surfing

long way:
think about the problem, how important it is for you. Are you sure that somebody will say thanks to you if you micromanage their web surfing habits? Is it really worth spending your time in days?
If you decide that it is worth the hassle, then you should analyze the traffic. And go from there. In analyzing, the squid-s access.logs are a simple place to look. So you can use squid, but mostly just to get the logs.

We used to run squids in front of all gov users (tens of thousands of users, out-of-country access logs were 2-3G/day) but at the present time it is better just to buy slightly more bandwidth, most of the traffic is not cacheable. Besides, squid is single threaded - will use only 1 cpu.

Hi,
Squide will definitely reduce the traffic, but how much that all depends upon how you configure it. Configuring SQUID is much complex even it has limited feature.

I have used IPCop { IPCop.org :: The bad packets stop here! }, and it had drastically reduce the bandwidth utilization. Even we were using it for VPN tunneling between two offices, it had saved lots of cost of dedicated lease line between offices. There are various addon availble for it, which will provide different features like urlfilter, vpn, firewall etc....

The Proxy logs IPCop shows doesn't include any size of fetched object and cache hits/misses stats. I would like to see, what URLs causes the most of the traffic in system. Can IPCop do that? It seems, some addon is needed for it. Probably, SquidGuard? Is there any interface to examine logs?

BTW, isn't IPCop based on SQUID source?

Yes it is SQUID base, but I think other than SQUID, the addons running its own program and that's adding various feature in it.

Check the IPCop web site for addon, may be you get any suitable for your requirement.

Ok, thank you.