Squid is easy to use as a caching proxy and can pretty much be used "out
of the box."  If you want to do user authentication or ads filtering or
such, it takes a bit more effort to configure, but you should be able to
get it up and running within a few minutes.

I've used WWWOffle, but not as a caching proxy.  When I build systems that
reside behind an authenticating proxy, WWWOffle is one of the first
packages I install because it can be easily configured to pass my
username/password to the up-stream proxy when making requests.  I then set
http_proxy and ftp_proxy environment variables to localhost for building
further packages.  This can probably be done with Squid too, I just found
that, for me, WWWOffle worked easier for this solution.

---
  /\---/\  Eric J Fox
 /  o o  \ Small Business Computer Support
 \.\   /./ in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area
    \@/    http://www.bsdsystems.com/
.


On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, Benjamin Walkenhorst wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I think about setting up a caching proxy on my local network.
> I know of two free proxies available for BSD, Squid and WWWOffle.
>
> Are there any other solutions I should consider?
> What are the pros and cons of Squid and WWWOffle? Squid, I hear, is hard
> to configure.
>
> Any remarks?
> Does anyone use one of these solutions and can tell about good or bad
> experiences?
>
> It would also be nice - but not neccessary - to tell the proxy for
> individual pages/servers how long to keep items in cache (so news pages
> are refreshed more often). Or to tell the proxy to refresh certain sites
> in cache automatically in given intervals and server them entirely from
> cache...
> OTOH I don't want to spend endless hours setting this thing up - I
> mainly want a web cache.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Benjamin
>