Which Squid?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Sun, 08 Mar 2009, David Groos wrote:

> I´ve got an Edubuntu/LTSP setup and I´m working on getting squid going and
> having quite a challenge with it--too much specialized/unknown vocabulary
> for me.  I don´t need squid for caching of objects since I´m using thin
> clients, 

Huh?  I'm not sure I follow you here.  Every firefox user, even on the one
machine, will have their own small firefox cache directory -- they won't be
shared.  This is not at all a replacement for squid's caching.

> but want to use it for coordinating white lists with different groups of
> users. I thought before I invest myself further in learning squid I
> should first decide which version to use.  Also, I´m going to be using
> squidguard as an add-on.  I understand that squid-stable is at 2.6
> currently and that is what I was working on.    However, should I use
> this version, install/invest in 2.7, move up to 3.0 or 3.1?  I would
> appreciate anyone´s opinion on this!

The Squid package in Ubuntu Hardy is squid v2.6 and squid3 is available as
a separate package.  I tried squid3 and it segfaulted repeatedly on me. I
first tried backporting the later squid3 package from intrepid.  That
segfaulted too, so I'm using the default v2.6 version which is far more
reliable.  I'd like to look at v2.7, but I don't wish to maintain a
backport if I can avoid it so I stuck with v2.6.

We're quite a busy site -- our squid instance peaks at about 150 requests
per second.  Maybe a quieter site might not have the same stability issues.

If you don't mind maintaining a custom compile, v2.7 is probably better
than v2.6 but personally I'm holding off v3.

Getting squid working is fairly straightforward.  Tuning it to work well
and maximise the cache hits can be quite involved.

Gavin