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

[Michael Trausch]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 3:18 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> 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.

Oh, yes.  A caching proxy is absolutely required in an environment
where you have more than 5 or 10 people using it concurrently on a
regular basis.  Even when you have 70+ Mbps Internet service, it makes
a difference, having both a caching DNS server and a caching Web
proxy.  A _huge_ difference.  Also, while it was _totally_ not
practical when I was in high school (in part because my school wasted
so much money on fscking infrastructure software such as Novell's
network setup on a Windows 98/NT 4/Win2k network).

Internet at the school was something that was new then, especially on
our desks.  And the network was _so_ insecurely setup.  I remember
learning about a workaround to a common problem.  We had this pretty
unreliable filtering and caching proxy server, and it had stupid block
lists and what not which would keep you from getting to legitimate
sites.  The thing would completely quit working anywhere from two to
four times per week for several weeks (apparently it was some problem
with the box's hardware that a replacement cured).  When the Web
became inaccessible to us, we'd often find ourselves with little else
to do.  The other kids in the class would fire up Quake and kill each
other, while I would poke around the network, which was insanely easy,
because the school wasn't using those new-fangled expensive switches.
Instead, they were setup with a whole floor on a huge Ethernet hub.
What a mess, but it made poking around the network pretty easy, since
I just had to use tcpdump to see what was going on.  :-)

Anyway, I learned of an alternate router on the network that required
IP addresses in a different subnet before it'd accept traffic, but it
would bypass all the proxying and stuff.  The teacher learned that I'd
learned this, and I became the gopher for things from the Internet
when the stupid proxy went down, because the teacher didn't trust
anybody else with that information, lol.

   --- Mike