Submitted by ggarron on Sat, 10/27/2007 - 08:16
Be sure to read Boost your internet speed part I
I am writing this post because a reader of this site has suggested.
Polipo is a Linux proxy, like squid but it is intended in a personal use, I used to use squid as my personal proxy but because I have a PIV HT processor and 1 Gig of RAM, in Laptop that approach was just to heavy for it.
Now with Polipo things will change, well go to the installation.
Installation
apt-get install polipo
There is almost no need to change the configuration file as with the defaults it will work great as a personal firewall.
But if you are configuring it as you home proxy, you can change these lines on the file /etc/polipo/config
proxyAddress = "0.0.0.0" # IPv4 only allowedClients = 127.0.0.1, 192.168.42.0/24
be sure to change 192.168.42.0/24 for your own IP address range, in general no further changes are needed.
Firefox configuration
Go to Edit->Preferences->
On this screen:
Select Advanced and then click on setting, then:
Select "Manual proxy configuration" and enter the IP of the PC where polipo is installed and enter the port which is: 8123
Gnome configuration
Go to Desktop->preferences->Network Proxy
And Select "Manual Proxy Configuration" and also here enter the IP of the PC where Polipo installed and the port 8123
Opera Configuration
Go to Tools->preferences, and once on this screen
Now select Advance and click on Network and then on Proxy Servers.
And once again enter the IP and port of your polipo server.
As a final step you can configure your apt if you are using Debian or Ubuntu, I always do, that way my Laptop gets its updated really fast as usually my Desktop have already downloaded them.
Apt Configuration to work with proxy
vi /etc/apt/apt.conf
And add this line
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:8123";
be sure to change the IP to the one that corresponds to your Polipo server.
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I've been attempting to do this proxy caching technique using Squid, but I really am wondering exactly how it functions and I have some doubts as to whether or not it really works.
So from my understanding this is how it all works:
Next time user goes to that page, ideally the content is cached locally and it will load quickly from the harddrive.
Now my major question is -
I can see how a localhost proxy cache would be useful if you had multiple people logging into the same machine where their browsers have seperate caches - but is there any benefit to proxy cache in a single user setting?
Does the browser cache and the proxy cache function in the same way? Do they save everything? .JS, .SWF, .PNG, etc... ? Wouldn't it be best to then disable the browser cache to avoid redundant disk usage?
What happens if a dial up user clicks Stop - does the proxy server continue to load the files for that page - actually causing their internet speed to slow down??
Haha sorry for the rant but if anyone knows the answer to any of these questions.. please please post :) Thanks!