A few small additions to my previous message. First, I wrote: "unlike a business, I have no ability to set up SUS or WUS, because this would require me to have administrative control of my users' machines,"
Our ISP is, of course, a business (or at least I hope it is). ;-) What I meant to say was, "unlike a business that owns all the machines on its network, I can't set up SUS or WUS for every machine to which I provide Internet access, because I don't have administrative control of my customers' computers." Secondly, one other quirk we've noted on our test servers concerns Squid's logging. When Squid is fetching all of an object in response to a range request, and gets additional range requests for that object (which it will under Windows Update), it logs them in an odd way. Until the entire object has arrived, each subsequent request is shown as a TCP_MISS with result code 200, but with a source of NONE (because Squid has been "running ahead of" the client was able to satisfy the request from disk). If several clients are fetching the file, all of their accesses show up like this until the file is fully stored in the cache. This throws off the statistics, both for byte hit rates and URL hit rates. All the clients after the first should really be generating "hits," because they're being served from disk. --Brett Glass
