ClearOS has to be one of the laziest things ever, but one of the coolest things ever, too. It's a Gateway, Proxy, Shares manager, and much more rolled into one. Easy to manage in-all, update, and hack (OK, maybe not all the time, but what do you expect?).
A few things that attracted me to the ClearOS solution was (and still is):
- Caching
- Proxy (/Filter)
- Blacklisting
- Anti-Virus
- Web Interface
Now I'm sure there's others out there, and you can also build this solution yourself. Seeing how I'm familiar with most of these to use, and implement, I did not really care to get lazy and use a web interface with it. I can spend all day in the console, but it doesn't hurt to have a little cushion there, er.. or to be lazy. The main thing that pulled me towards ClearOS and its all-in-one approach was the caching.
Thus, I wish to share the home network's caching reports. It surprised me at how much of an impact using a local caching server actually helps.
Reports
This isn't entirely a month, but I'm sure you can get the idea.
At another glance, by month.
Against what?
In rough-draft-mode, there are at least 4 to 6 active physical machines utilising the Internet. May it be some streaming activity, mail retrieval, or mass-storage movement between here and remote servers .. There can be a huge amount of data consumed. Some screens straight from the feeder (router) itself:
253GB in (if I did my maths right ..) in total passed in May. So the Squid is doing a great job I'd say at attempting to capture what it can.Whether it's caching more than serving is up to question. Reviewing some of the domains it's been serving most is generally photo and music sites. (YouTube, HypeM, Grooveshark, Facebook, etc).
So I'd safely say, that in some cases this is a relief to the network. It may not be the "all and all" solution for using less bandwidth when it comes to mass-storage movement, but it does indeed lower web (http/) traffic to free up some space for something else.
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