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First, I am not sure if Varnish can be used as web-cache to speedup internet in small offices.

We have an office with 20 systems around and we frequently browse same set of websites.

I setup squid and it worked fine for sometime. But I couldn't get to cache youtube videos which was my main aim.

I came recently across Varnish while playing with nginx but I see it is being used as web-accelerator for backend server.

Can we use Varnish instead of nginx for web-cache in transparent way? I mean to say that people in my office will not need to configure proxy on their machine.

Thanks,

-Rahul

rahul286
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2 Answers2

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Varnish really isn't meant to be a general purpose web cache like Squid. From the Varnish FAQ:

Does that mean I can't use Varnish as a forward proxy? You can, but you probably don't want to. Doing it requires significant amounts of DNS magic and a huge Varnish VCL file.

You can configure squid as a transparent proxy (on Windows you need some third-party software to handle what iptables does on Linux) and alleviate the need to configure PCs to use the proxy.

Caching YouTube videos is a pain, irrespective of the transparency of the proxy. You can read about some of the problems caching YouTube content and see possible "workarounds" that may or may not work for you (or may stop working if YouTube makes changes).

Evan Anderson
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  • Thanks Evan. :-) I am already running squid in transparent proxy mode using iptables. I guess I better put more efforts in squid for youtube issue rather than looking for alternative. – rahul286 Jul 16 '10 at 16:42
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Sorry to jump in. Try using Lusca (a fork of the Squid-2 development tree), and for the video's http://cachevideos.com/. It's really works on me.

Ta Coen
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