On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 00:13 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> You convinced me to start squid,
> but unfortunately after reading my trusty tutorial,
> <http://www.brennan.id.au/11-Squid_Web_Proxy.html>,
> and looking through /etc/squid/squid.conf ,
> I decided the chances of my making a mistake,
> and cutting off my family from the internet,
> was too high to risk.
>
> I do realise that it would be good to run squid on my server,
> but as I said it seems a risky enterprise.
>
> Is it possible to use squid just for yum, say,
> as an experimental start?
If you set up TCP/IP redirection rules to force everything to go through
a proxy (transparent proxying), then yes, you can cause networking
problems for people, as some things just do not work through proxies.
But, if you just install Squid, and don't do anything else than install
a proxy, then only the things that you deliberately configure to use a
proxy, will use it. Everything else will carry on, as before.
Firefox, for example, won't use a proxy unless you configure it to do
so. There are various ways to set it to use one.
* You can simply enter the proxy server addresses into the
configuration.
* You can tell it to read a proxy configuration script (JavaScript
PAC files), which might be a local file, or one on a local web
server. Letting you use just one file to tweak all sorts of
proxy-related things, and you'll only have to modify that one
file if your proxying needs change in the future.
* It's also possible to use auto proxy configuration with various
browsers, where they'll look for a proxy configuration file in
certain expected locations - such as a proxy address supplied by
a DHCP server, or looking for a wpad.dat file in the root of a
webserver with a wpad subdomain and the same domain name as the
computer's. But, if they don't find that file, they don't use
any proxy. It is the cause of some browser start-up delays with
some browsers, as the first thing they do is try to find that
configuration file. Though the current Firefox's defaults
aren't set to to work that way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol
You do, of course, still have to configure the proxy so it allows the
things you want it to do.
--
The gates in my computer are AND, OR and NOT; they are not Bill.