Hello Robert and others, On 11/05/03 09:14, Robert Miller wrote: > With regard to Ahmed's note and the great work he is doing by bringing > Internet literacy to the students in his university in Nigeria, what if > you could connect one Campus Content server to that Internet connection > and locally store many times the content in the US Library of Congress? > What if this provided simultaneous access for several hundred users on > campus?
That is a great idea. When I connected a small college in Kenya to the internet via a 64K VSAT connection, I installed a cacheing transparent proxy server. The first time someone downloaded something, the content would be fetched from the server and stored in the proxy server. For all subsequent downloads, the content would be sent to the local requestor's browser from the cache and not from the server. This vastly improved performance and download speeds. Another advantage of using proxy servers is that the administrator can set up access lists and access times. So, for example, an administrator can configure the proxy such that when a class is in progress, the students would only be able to access the prescribed materials and nothing else. A week after I connected my college, I discovered that the network usage was inordinately high. Looking at the logs I saw too many connections going to Brazil! It was a worm that had infected the lab computers. The network usage was taking up precious bandwidth from legitimate packets. I wrote a two line rule in the proxy server to drop all requests going to the Brazilian site and the network utilization dropped dramatically. Thaths -- Slacker At Large http://openscroll.org/ Key fingerprint = 8A 84 2E 67 10 9A 64 03 24 38 B6 AB 1B 6E 8C E4 ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org