18 September 2008 @ 20:44SquidMan makes proxy serving easy

I gave SquidMan a test drive today and am pleased with how easy it makes setting up a Squid proxy on Mac OS X. SquidMan will install and manage the Squid proxy cache. With SquidMan you can cache frequently downloaded content to allow for faster web browsing. You can also use SquidMan to cache content for other computers on your network.

My only complaint with this experience is not actually a complaint against SquidMan, but instead against Firefox (and possibly other browsers). Once I had setup the machine that was running SquidMan, I went to another machine on the network, changed its proxy settings to point to the SquidMan machine, and then launched Firefox and browsed some pages. I then went back to SquidMan and checked the access_log, but there was nothing. At first I thoughtSquidMan wasn’t working, but after some checking, I realized that Firefox does not use the Mac’s proxy settings. Instead, you have to go to the Firefox preferences and enter the proxy settings there. However, Safari will honor the settings that you set in the System Preferences. What this means is that anyone with access to a non-Safari browser can change the browser settings to get around the proxy. I don’t see any way in which to lock those settings.

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Screenshots below: