Re: Question of which to choose

At 01:48 PM 12/8/98 +0800, Ronneil Camara wrote:
>I'm being bombarded here of why I'm very eager to push for the Squid
>Proxy Server. It's actually installed. What my company wants is
>Microsoft Proxy Server. Can you give me some reasons of why we would go
>for Squid not including it's Free. Thanks.

I have a few:

From experience with MS and Squid (both squid-1.1 and squid-2) I've seen that
Squid outperforms the MS both on performance and on features.

On the performance side: squid likes some memory (squid-2 needs a bit less
than
squid-1.1 in my observation) but NT likes a lot too. An added benefit of squid
is that the OS (Unix) can be stripped to the basics (I once installed a Linux
kit on a i386, 4M and 20M disk space without any pain for a special monitoring
job) So in general the hardware requirements are lower or with the same
hardware investment the performance is better.

On the features side. Squid is superior here. MS can't handle multiple parents
and/or siblings and can't handle it if a parent goes off-line (squid just can
bypass the parent when it falls over or gets to slow in responding). Squid can
be tuned to cache specific URL's (even dynamic can be cached if you tune it
correctly). In general open standards (like ICP, Digest, CARP etc) are
supported and can be enabled or not. The MS proxy is more limited here.

On the reliability side: I have a few Squid proxies running and our
organization has a few MS onces in the field (against my advice by the way)
and
the Squid's haven't crashed. My last calculation of my local production Squid
running Solaris was 99.977% up time (that is 2 months ago and it is still
running without a crash).

Also it is not required to reboot the system to upgrade or replace any
software. A Squid upgrade can be done with almost no down-time. I never
announce any upgrades to Squid but just do and no-one has ever noticed the
downtime while it is permanently busy. Try to do that with MS or NT in
general.

Another reason, for me, to use Squid is full remote control. I have
installed 2
proxies 400km from here without leaving my office on machines I've never seen.
I still maintain them and have never needed to go over there in the 2 years
that site is running Squid.

Squid/Unix can produce nice statistics/accounting from the logs. In a Unix
environment scheduling automated scripts to generate reports and to do routine
management is easy and doesn't require expensive software.

Conclusion: Squid is faster on the same hardware (or requires less hardware
for
the same performance), has more and better features, has parent fall-over
handling capabilities, remote management & control is standard, excellent
reporting capabilities.

Disclaimer: These statements are done on personal title and don't necessary
reflect the opinions of my employer.

Regards, Marc van Selm
Proxy manager
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Marc van Selm
NATO C3 Agency
Communication Systems Division, A-Branch
Tel: +31 70 3142454
E-mail: marc.van.selm@nc3a.nato.int
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Private: selm@cistron.nl, selm@het.net, http://www.cistron.nl/~selm
Received on Tue Dec 08 1998 - 02:08:04 MST