Re: [squid-users] what's better than msproxy 2: Does someone wants to laugh ?

Ben,

It sounds like you IT people have more money than sense.

(i'm pro squid and *nix/opensource) however I have experience with
commercial products & how they influence in big companies

From a support perspective, companies would rather pay for something
commercial that they can get support for, even if it uses opensource. There
is a sense of commercial responsibility there also, having someone to blame
if the software doesn't work/hardware fails. i know of at least five
companies I've dealt with who've dumped Squid on FreeBSD/*nix for /netscape
proxy/ iPlanet on Solaris, a cost increase of around 1000%... similarly
apache for A.N Other commercial webserver product.

What you also have to recognise that If you have a *nix squid server and
it's working nicely, and you happen to leave, then the box goes pear shaped
(for whatever reason), then it is perceived to be much harder to get a unix
person who knows your particular breed of solution, however its supposed to
be easier to get a microsoft monkey to administrate ISA/MS proxy on a win
platform. Having the best mousetrap isn't always a good thing...

Alot of companies have in the past been pro branded names, and recognise a
good industry name with a particular solution. This gives a certain sense of
credibility. ie, buying M1cr0$oft. It's not necessarily the best product at
doing X, but comes with support and "supposedly" has a good reputation.
(however, others will disagree).

However, if you were to fully document all features with detailed
instructions on how to administrate your system with minimal unix knowledge,
including troubleshooting, then it would be benificial to you to keep what
you have. if you did happen to leave, or be off on holiday/ill, then it
would be possible for anyone to fix your cache server.

Cost vs performance. If to achieve a good service your *nix system costs say
$1000 and your new proposed Win solution costs around $10,000, then you
have a perfectly valid business case to keep your existing system.

Bells and whistles, Add in some kind of reporting tool like sarg and dans
guardian (a true internet content filter) and show your boss who's doing
what and who's looking at inappropriate sites (i know its an iffy thing to
do) but it'll win you brownie points... (just make sure you have a back door
out of your proxy so he doesn't see you internet access ;-) http-gw is
usually a good one, or another squid server on another port). Have the
reporting server run on an htttps server which requires a client browser
certificate/apache .htaccess for your reports? Compile in SNMP support and
install MRTG to monitor your bandwidth/squid useages... You boss will love
you for it, (not the sort of stuff that you can get readily on MS)

There is always the licensing costs MS vs *nix. Typically if you were to
have a win2k domain with say 200 users, and installed MS ISA server, you
would be looking at a client access license for each desktop who wishes to
access the proxy server, then the Win2k server license, cost of hardware,
plus the MS ISA server itself. (it doesn't take a rocket scientist to do
some quick calculations as to how much this mounts up to).

If you're argument for keeping MS is futile, then shoot your boss, or find
another job and leave... (you wish)

Good luck

dan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fathi Ben Nasr" <fathi.engineer@gnet.tn>
To: "Squid Users" <squid-users@squid-cache.org>
Sent: Friday, January 17, 8859 12:00 AM
Subject: Re: [squid-users] what's better than msproxy 2: Does someone wants
to laugh ?

I have probably been misunderstood.

I am a user of squid since some years now and don't want to change. I have
also
tried to influence/convince our decision makers to use what I call ALGOS
(apache
linux and other gnu stuff). But this ones or more exactly the previous
decision
makers didn't want to have any linux box running anywhere in the company;
they
are probably anti free/inexpensive software. I have to try to convince the
new
decision makers to use algos but I am in short of arguments (or more
exactly new
arguments).

Now, the technical decision influencers doesn't even want to allow me to
make
demonstrations of the power and flexibility of squid and are evaluating new
cache/proxy software they didn't give me the names of. All what I could
have as
information from these people is that the software they will probably use
is a
one that browses continuously the internet refreshing its cache without
request
from the client and I am looking for arguments to present to the new
decision
makers to convince them to not use such a bandwidth waster software or at
least
to give me a chance to make a squid demonstartion.

TIA.
FAthi Ben Nasr

Apache a écrit :

> Dear Fathi,
> your story is kinda intresting. ;)
> but did you compare with the feature for squid with msproxy?
> What i think the major different is the price and performance for that
> product.
>
> Do you have a result to stat the msproxy perform great.
> If you would like to talk bout performance. I think Joe is right person
to
> talk to.
>
> you paid and thats what you get. you paid for the bandwidth which you
> subcribed for. why not you able to utilise the service. or maybe you
talking
> bout a different case.
>
> free product doesnt mean bad product, depends on how you evaluate that
> product. and how it can fit to your environment.
>
> regards,
> hwahing
>
> On 16 =?iso-8859-1?Q?-D=E9c-2002_09=3A54=3A40_CET?=, Fathi Ben Nasr wrote
> > Hello,
> >
> > This is not a joke but a real story.
> > I have people here thinking to replace msproxy 2 by a cahe they saw
> > in a demonstartion.
> >
> > What this cache does is continuously browse the internet and reload
> > pages that have been visited by its users and if necessary refreshes
> > them so that when a user reconnects to that site it gets the page
> > from the cache and not from the internet.
> >
> > What I know is that this is a big waste of bandwith secondly and that
> > firstly the internet is not ours and so should not be overloaded by
> > unusefull traffic reloading ech half an our pages that are probably
> > consulted once a week.
> >
> > Do you see any other inconvinient so I could convince this people to
> > not do at least such a big mistake. They still blind and deaf to the
> > use of open-source software.
> >
> > The reason ? Do you remeber the first reclam for the renault clio
> > car : not enough expensive ?
> >
> > TIA
> >
> > Fathi B.N.
> >
> > (See attached file: smime.p7s)

(See attached file: smime.p7s)
Received on Tue Dec 17 2002 - 03:46:26 MST