[ale] Does anybody have experience with a load-balancing/failover distro?

[david w. millians]

On 9/29/2010 3:18 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> schools really need a proxy like squid. One person hits a site and then
> 30 others hit the same site. Squid will (in this example) cut the used
> bandwidth to about 1/30 as the first hit is cached. Saw this in action
> during the APS Linux thin client project. bandwidth is scarce in schools
> and not having a caching proxy is just a bad idea.

I don't have any in my service area that don't have a proxy. Before the 
majority of mine all had fiber between the bulk of their schools- 
there's a couple that have wireless links because of multiple carriers 
and that mess, and a few that have no choice but phone-line based 
solutions-  I had a few that used dual-level proxies, too. Since they 
had, say, 768k/sec back to the board office, we put proxies in local to 
save both internal and external slowness. This was when a district would 
have 1 T1 line.

Of course, back then, squid was VERY scary to configure. Not so much 
anymore. I suspect some of the boxes they've paid for are indeed squid.

The last time I saw some stats, schools average about 40% cache hits. It 
helps, of course, but 3megs is still not that much for a whole school.