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





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