Thinking of controling and managing Internet access in your office using minimum hardware and software investment? Consider the solution from Free Open Source Software (FOSS) community!

Installed in a Linux box, Squid Proxy Server (www.squid-cache.org) provides a robust, scalable and industrial proven solution for a full-featured Web proxy cache services.

Squid Proxy Server supports

• proxying and caching of HTTP, FTP, and other URLs
• proxying for SSL
• cache hierarchies
• ICP, HTCP, CARP, Cache Digests
• transparent caching
• WCCP (Squid v2.3 and above)
• extensive access controls
• HTTP server acceleration
• SNMP
• caching of DNS lookups

More important, its reporting companion -- SARG (Squid Analysis Report Generator) provides the system administrator to generate management reports on top-N sites, most popular sites, most heavy users, blocked websites, bandwidth usage, etc. 

If you are running Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory, Squid Proxy Server can be integrated so that you can have single sign-on for Internet access.

Last but not least, SquidGuard (www.squidguard.org) plug-in provides you with additional content filtering features to your network control.

System Requirements

• Computer with Intel Pentium III 300MHz processor or above
• 128MB RAM or above
• 500MB of space (for caching purpose)
• Recommended CentOS, Fedora, SuSE Linux

The performance of Proxy Server is based on I/O (Input/Output) speed and not much on processor speed. So a fast hard disk and ample of RAM is more important.