ALIX (nanobsd) + squid cache on external HD?

[senser]

has anyone tried this? is the 256mb ram of the ALIX even good enough? what about the 500MHz CPU?
I'd like to try dansguardian but don't have any experience with squid or dans. what do you think? is this worth a try? thx

[phil.davis]

I would also be interested in this (don't have time to mess with it right now). I am guessing that an external USB disk can be connected to the Alix USB port. Then format, mount the disk and point Squid at it. Of course, appropriate stuff will need to be modified in the boot so the disk is mounted…
@senser - it shouldn't require any fancy hardware, give it a go and tell us the news.

[stephenw10]

@senser:

has anyone tried this? is the 256mb ram of the ALIX even good enough? what about the 500MHz CPU?

Yes some people have tried this, in fact there were several threads about it seem to recall. Perhaps not with an Alix specifically.

Back in the day I used to run IPCop (before I saw the light) on an ancient machine. I ran Squid/Squidguard on that and it didn't seem to have a problem. It was a Cyrix M2 at 333MHz with 192MB of ram if memory serves. Of course my internet hook up was significantly slower back then, maybe 8Mbps, that I can't remember.  ::)

Steve

Edit: Some Googling has shown that the Cyrix M2 333 actually ran at 250MHz! 333 was just a rating relative to a P100.

Edit: Here's an example but there are other similar threads: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,36724.0.html

[matguy]

@stephenw10:

Edit: Some Googling has shown that the Cyrix M2 333 actually ran at 250MHz! 333 was just a rating relative to a P100.

Yeah, I had the earlier P150+ that was rated to run at 120MHz.  It was so unstable at that speed, however, that we ended up clocking them down to 90MHz.  I ended up with 2 of them, back then.  They were pretty worthless for much of anything desktop related, but once they were clocked down they were perfectly stable.  They became a pair of DNS servers for our super-small colo we built back then.