[olug] Proxy server hardware requirements

[Jason Zeisler]

LOL. We do have a large family, but that big.

Jason Z.

________________________________________________

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock


On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Obi-Wan <obiwan at jedi.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 15:54, Jason Zeisler <superztnt at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I want to set up a proxy server in my house to run DansGuardian. I have
> a
> >> couple of old systems in my house that are just sitting on the shelf and
> I
> >> want to put them to good use. My concern is that if I use a system that
> is
> >> too slow or doesn't have enough get up and go to be used as a proxy
> server
> >> that I may slow things down too much. One is pretty old. AMD-K2 500Mhz,
> >> 256MB Ram, 40GB hard drive. Another thing that I was thinking about
> trying
> >> was to used this as a firewall and anti-virus too. I saw an article on
> the
> >> net about that and wanted to give it a try. Also any recommendations for
> the
> >> best flavor of Linux to use for this.
> >
> > So what recommendations are there for minimum system requirements to run
> > something like this? This is what I am trying to figure out. I don't want
> to
> > cause a slowdown on my home network. How fast should this system be? Any
> > suggestions?
>
> I'd choose your software first, then follow the author's recommendations.
> They know better than anybody what resources their software needs.
>
> For reference, a large hospital where I used to work used to run a
> web proxy for ~1500 employees, including URL filtering (but not
> content filtering -- Squid + DansGuardian) off a 1GHz Pentium 3
> server with less than 1GB of RAM.  A user-tunable cache pool is
> the only disk usage beyond the OS.  That setup ran just peachy.
> Content filtering takes a lot more horsepower, but unless you have
> a *VERY* large family, I think the box you mentioned will be adequate.
> Still, it sure wouldn't hurt to increase the RAM if there's room.
>
> What's the worst that can happen?  You set it up, try it, and decide
> that you need faster hardware after all?
>
> We ran RedHat for political reasons, but any distro that stays current
> should work just fine.
>
>
> --
> Ben "Obi-Wan" Hollingsworth                             obiwan at jedi.com
>   The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the
>     Giver of all good things, so if I stand, let me stand on the
>       promise that You will pull me through.  -- Rich Mullins
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> https://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>