life | delimited

My firefox love while still strong, has been dwindling in the last few weeks over the fact I have to close and re-open it twice a day. I’m back to being smidgen now that a came across a new gem. They’re called smart keywords and allow you to type something like in your address bar

w bukowski

To go to the wikipedia search results for “bukowski” assuming you set up the wikipedia search box as a smart keyword for “w”. It takes 10 seconds to set up a smart keyword and is extremely rewarding.

See how to get it hooked up over at Cogent Metal…

Thought I’d throw up a quick post about the benefit of using a proxy server for caching internet content. The outgoing bandwidth where I work has been on a constant upswing over the last few years thanks to the rise of content rich sites and streaming video. During the day our outgoing connection was being fully utilized and I started to look at bumping our bandwidth up. The cost led to explore alternative methods first before paying thousands of dollars so Nancy in accounting could watch cute cat videos on youtube. I took the easy way out and threw up a microsoft isa server and put it inline right before our perimeter firewall. I set the cache size to 750MB and let it do it’s thing. Here are the results from last month…

Almost 50% off outbound traffic is returned directly from the proxy server cache without having to go out to the internet. I expected a difference but 50% is huge. I’m not going to go into any implementation details, just figured I’d post the results to encourage anyone in the same position to go down this road.

There are plenty of other options then just Microsoft ISA server. Here are the one’s I’ve had experience with.

Hardware devices:

• Bluecoat - I’ve used these for a reverse proxy scenario and would highly recommend. I’m planning to replace our forward proxy with an array of these sometime soon.

Software:

• Microsoft ISA server - Gets the job done, but the idea of using a windows server as a “firewall” is scary. It’s cake to set up and get going though.
• Squid - Primarily for linux, but there are binaries for windows and solaris. If you want a proven solution on the cheap, this would be it. I ran this in college at a house with some bandwidth hungry roommates, the install isn’t too bad and I’m sure it’s gotten easier since then.

Other proxy benefits:

• User authentication. Control who is allowed allowed to access what going out your network.
• Tie-ins to content filtering products life squidguard or websense to save even more bandwidth by blocking sites deemed inappropriate or unnecessary for business use.

Got a similar success story or proxy maintenance nightmare or question, post a comment…