>All,
>
>General question here...
>What does the Squid Proxy server do and why would I want to use it?
>
>My setup is a single RH7.2 box providing these services
>1. Apache
>2. Sendmail
>3. Samba
>
>Since I have a hardware firewall/router, would Squid provide any benefit?
>
>Thanks for any responses!
>
>Mike Copeland
>Genesis Group Software

Squid caches http, ftp, and gopher data. You would use it so that multiple users could access a shared local cache for internet data so the users would not have to go through the internet gateway for cached data. Squid caches can be cascaded through multiple gateways. Squid can also be reversed so that hits to your web servers can be reduced by caching out going data.

This can benefit you in the following fashion:
you have muliple Linux boxes that use FTP do get updated RPMs
you update machine 1 from your distributions FTP server
machine 2 through n will find the new RPMs in the local Squid cache and avoid having to go through the internet to get the new RPMs

This works the same way for http and gopher.