RE: [squid-users] Windows Automatic Update (WAU) and non-transparent squid proxy (was Re: [squid-users] Major malfunction: Squid and Windows Update)

From: Tim Howell <Tim.Howell@dont-contact.us>
Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 07:55:27 -0700

D & E Radel wrote:
> From: "Kevin" <kkadow@gmail.com>
>
>> Yes, there is a fix.
>>
>> While "Windows Automatic Update" on WinXP doesn't inherently pick up
>> proxy settings for IE from the Control Panel, there is a command-line
>> tool called "proxycfg" (installed via SP2?) which can force WAU to
>> use a proxy. Apparently there is also a way to set the proxy for
>> WAU via directly manipulating the registry, if you're cool with that.
>
> Hi Kevin,
>
> Thanks for that. I wonder the easiest way to roll that out to a large
> number of Windows XP machines. Must be able to write some script and
> deploy via Group Policy. Not really the scope of this email list, but
> no doubt a re-occurring problem for Squid users.
>
> I have just read about Windows Server Update Services which is
> seemingly a free service for Server 2003 and has a client for each XP
> machine. Not sure which is the best route to take though.

Windows Update Services (WUS) is the product you're looking for. It is
free, and it runs on Windows 2000 Server (which we use) or Windows 2003.
It uses the Automatic Updates program that can be installed on Win2K and
it part of WinXP by default. You use group policy to point your
machines to your WUS server. On the server itself you can control which
updates are downloaded, approved, and installed on which machines. You
can also see the status of each update on each machine. It's pretty
useful, and about 1000 times better than Software Update Services,
Microsoft's previous update offering.

That said, I also do sometimes run Windows Update manually on the
machines on my network, and they don't have any problems with Squid. In
fact, the speed with which they download large updates leads me to
believe that Squid *is* caching the updates. The .NET Framework 1.1
update (about 23 MB) often downloads in 3-5 seconds, which is a lot
faster than we should expect from DSL. ;-)

FWIW, I'm running Squid 2.5.STABLE9 non-transparently under linux on a
dual P3 733 with 1.5GB RAM and three fast (10,000 RPM) SCSI drives for
cache stores.

--TWH
Received on Fri May 06 2005 - 08:55:29 MDT

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