Re: Is there a Squid port for NT going on?

I'm running squid on unix, but I'd dearly love it to work on NT boxen as
well; our smaller sites do not have Unix there, and they do have NT. For
those who advocate the use of freeware OS's, there are a number of
problems with that:

* it may not fit with corporate strategy (ie we will only have NT (and
minimal Solaris for the mainframe replacement jobs; even then there is a
push to move these applications to NT within five years) in less than
two years servicing > 5000 users in > 20 hospitals and clinics)
* it is sometimes easier to have a product that will run on a variety of
OS's (see the RC5 distributed client for a good example!) than not to

I've been looking at a NT/Win32 squid port for a while. I was looking at
making a MMC front end for the squid.conf file (you can still do the
hand editing, but in many situations, using a known tool is a better
idea) and porting the actual product.

However, for better or for worse, squid has many many unixisms. Due to
the major design philosophy of squid so far, a threaded version has not
even been contemplated. I understand that there may not be much (if any)
gain from a multi-threaded version of squid but with some OS's like NT,
the only way to get a reliable TCP/IP based service is to be
multi-threaded. The old POSIX interfaces are there but there are
restrictions on their use (like minimal interaction with Win32 API's and
I believe a 64 socket restriction...) That's why a native version will
be necessary. A port to the POSIX subsystem will be fairly brain dead
due to the braindeaded nature of the POSIX subsystem.

Multi-threaded (and better - they are fast) networking alternatives do
exist. This sort of forces the threading issue. I was waiting for a
threaded version of squid to come out (or at least a start) as I wanted
to be within the main source tree for squid rather than have a work
alike product.

Any NT version should be multithreaded - it's the only way to achieve
decent concurrency on that platform. All my NT servers bar the little
uns are dual processor or better. All the solaris boxes we have here are
also multiple CPU boxes as well. The current DEC Unix boxes are mostly
uniprocessor, but a few might survive to get another processor.

The bottom line is that I'd like any NT port to be in the main source
tree if possible, freely available and best of all completely compatible
with any other port.

If you're interested on working on a NT native version of squid, e-mail
me off line, and we'll get something together. My working environment is
Visual C++. I probably would like to use the IDE but I can hack nmake if
it proves necessary.

Andrew van der Stock
Information Services
North Western Health Care Network
Received on Sun Feb 01 1998 - 04:31:31 MST