Lunatic Platitudes

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Squid over the past several days… maybe the last couple of weeks. It is really an interesting bit of software that most everyone has relied on at one point or another, whether you knew it or not.

I wanted to take a couple of notes on things I’ve run across so far, mostly related to my own deployment:

1. Running the port 3128 through Smart Defense can cause issues that don’t look like a problem connecting to the proxy.
2. Ubuntu APT must be configured to point to the proxy. The system-wide network proxy setting under the System menu doesn’t cut it for APT. (ref)
3. Firefox doesn’t do WPAD like IE… IE uses a custom DHCP config and Firefox uses DNS to guess where to get your PAC from: (ref)
4. Corkscrew in Linux along with an addition to permit port 22 in Squid will allow you to proxy SSH through Squid. Putty in Windows or Linux will allow you to natively add a proxy configuration for each of your destination hosts you wish to proxy for. I have not looked into or solved the possible issue of needing to proxy SSH from a MAC OS X system. Update: corkscrew should work in OSX… I’ll test it today.

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