REALLY transparent proxy!!! is it possible?

Jan 29 04 3:49 pm

I want to set up a proxy server for a 30 user workgroup. I don't need no user/pass verification. DHCP will set automatically everything and users will be on internet. I want to cache all web traffic including windows update files, Symantec Liveupdate files. I don't matter about FTP caching and SMTP/POP stuff.

DNS server will be used too.

is this possible?

Jan 29 04 4:50 pm

Well i say all of that was easy, except for maybe the windows update and symantec live update bits. If you use DHCP then all the clients will be issued with a default gateway and dns of the wingate machine, which means they will use NAT. You can turn on transparent redirection in the WWW proxy (or any other proxy you care to) and this will cache all WWW traffic on port 80. And this is why you wont be able to cache the windows / live updates. As far as im aware they take place on other ports (the initial bits i think are done over port 80) but the actual transfer of data is done on a custom port, which of course means that it will by pass the WWW proxy. Thus there is no real way to cache that information.

Regards

Neil

Jan 29 04 5:24 pm

actually.. windows update is cached by http proxy.... but liveupdate does not. are you planning to work on this?

Jan 29 04 5:27 pm

There are no immediate plans, but is certainly something we could look in to in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!

Regards

Neil