[olug] Proxy server hardware requirements

[Obi-Wan]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 15:54, Jason Zeisler <superztnt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I want to set up a proxy server in my house to run DansGuardian. I have a
>> couple of old systems in my house that are just sitting on the shelf and I
>> want to put them to good use. My concern is that if I use a system that is
>> too slow or doesn't have enough get up and go to be used as a proxy server
>> that I may slow things down too much. One is pretty old. AMD-K2 500Mhz,
>> 256MB Ram, 40GB hard drive. Another thing that I was thinking about trying
>> was to used this as a firewall and anti-virus too. I saw an article on the
>> net about that and wanted to give it a try. Also any recommendations for the
>> best flavor of Linux to use for this.
>
> So what recommendations are there for minimum system requirements to run
> something like this? This is what I am trying to figure out. I don't want to
> cause a slowdown on my home network. How fast should this system be? Any
> suggestions?

I'd choose your software first, then follow the author's recommendations.
They know better than anybody what resources their software needs.

For reference, a large hospital where I used to work used to run a
web proxy for ~1500 employees, including URL filtering (but not
content filtering -- Squid + DansGuardian) off a 1GHz Pentium 3
server with less than 1GB of RAM.  A user-tunable cache pool is
the only disk usage beyond the OS.  That setup ran just peachy.
Content filtering takes a lot more horsepower, but unless you have
a *VERY* large family, I think the box you mentioned will be adequate.
Still, it sure wouldn't hurt to increase the RAM if there's room.

What's the worst that can happen?  You set it up, try it, and decide
that you need faster hardware after all?

We ran RedHat for political reasons, but any distro that stays current
should work just fine.


-- 
Ben "Obi-Wan" Hollingsworth                             obiwan at jedi.com
   The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the
     Giver of all good things, so if I stand, let me stand on the
       promise that You will pull me through.  -- Rich Mullins