RE: What if Squid goes down?

On Wed, 10 Dec 1997, Barrie Hall wrote:

> I have found the same thing, we might loose the DNS, the ISDN link may go down, etc, it doesn't matter, any loss of service inevetibly brings screams of "the proxy's down again".
> Well after 5-6 months of 100% squid availability, Ive taken the Draconian step of blocking direct access to port 80 outside our firewall. Now everyone HAS to use the proxy. If we do start having problems, Ill probably be roasted on a spit, still it only takes 2 mins to restore access to port 80...

I'm just about to that point myself. Some or our School clients are
already configured this way since their squids are also blocking
objectionable sites (porn and chat rooms primarily). Some of the students
found out if they disabled the cache they could go to chat rooms. One of
these schools is an all-girl school, so imagine the problem the school had
when the girls discovered that hot mail's webchat thing would let them
gossip whil in class between different classrooms! Chaos! A simple entry
in the ACL "taboo.list" (appropriate name don't you think? :-) and that
problem was solved.

BTW, when we installed Navigator 4.0 we found that it wasn't difficult to
prevent users from chaning any of the network settings. There is a file
that netscape want's to see to run some kind of setting changer thing, and
since we have netscape running over the network we just removed that file.
If a user clicks on "Preferences" under the "Edit" menu, the machine just
returns them to the browser window as if they hadn't done anything. Now
there's a big that really is a feature!

> "Pre-pubescent Calamari" - Not the full Squid..
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Must be the old Harvest Cache ;-)

        -Bill
Received on Wed Dec 10 1997 - 20:12:49 MST