CISE Help & Resources
CISE Web Proxy
Our Little Proxy
We're running a small Squid caching proxy. The server is not powerful enough to perform under heavy use (it's sharing its host with too many other services), so it is not available off campus, but it may be of use to local users. Note: this is experimental, so there are known issues with it. For example, it does noticable affect the speed of browsing (especially when the server is under heavy load).
A caching proxy simply sits between your browser and the rest of the world. If your browser were the only one using the proxy, it wouldn't do anything that the normal browser cache doesn't do by default. But if many browsers use the same proxy, popular pages are only sent over the internet only once. In essence, it's like having a shared browser cache. The proxy doesn't cache information that must be kept private (such as that sent over an HTTPS connection), so there is no privacy or security concern here.
How you can use it
The CISE proxy is only open to the department and a few of the campus terminal servers (NERDC, Housing) often used by departmental students. The simplest way to set up a browser which supports the use of proxies (most browsers do). For Netscape, select the Preferences options in the Edit menu. Expand the Advanced category and select the Proxies subcategory. In the Proxies window that now shows up, you can choose either Manual proxy configuration or Automatic proxy configuration.
If you choose Automatic proxy configuration, set the value (URL) to be: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/proxy/proxy.pac.
If you choose Manual proxy configuration (which may be the only way to configure the proxy in some browsers), there will be a window with a table in it. The table gives the protocols, and a box to enter the proxy host and port for each protocol. The CISE proxy can serve for the HTTP, FTP, and Gopher protocols. Put proxy.cise.ufl.edu as the host for each of these protocols, and put 3128 as the port for each.
The installed version of Lynx uses the proxy by default. This shouldn't cause any problems; the proxy software is incredibly stable. If you need to go around the proxy, set the environment variable no_proxy to *. In tcsh, this is accomplished through the following command:
host:1% setenv no_proxy '*'
Why you might choose to use it
There are three reasons why you might choose to use the proxy server.
- Performance
- Since common web pages are cached locally, it is much faster to access them than going over the internet. Note: in some cases, the cache can actually slow browsing down, so performance is NOT enhanced all the time.
- Privacy
- Normally, whenever you access a web site, that web server can get information about the hosts that are accessing it. At the very least, web servers usually store the IP number of machines where you are browsing from (and sometimes, even more information then that). When you use the proxy, it is the proxy that makes the requests for you, so to the remote host, it appears as if it is the proxy that is doing the browsing. Note: this does not apply to the HTTPS protocol, so secure information never goes through the proxy.
- Frees up personal disk space
- If you use the proxy as your cache, there is no reason to
maintain a local disk cache. This is a simple and effective way
to free up some personal disk space.
In Netscape, select the Preferences options in the Edit menu. Expand the Advanced category and select the Cache subcategory. In the Cache window that now shows up, you can set the Disk cache to 0 and then click on the Clear Disk Cache button.
Privacy concerns
Using our proxy does not imply that your every move is being tracked. We do keep a log of transactions; it lives in /cise/info/proxy/log/proxy/. We do not record from which host a request comes, or any other personal information, so it is impossible to match a request with the person making it.
As such, proxies can actually enhance privacy. When you use the proxy server, your requests are mixed with all the other users' requests. Also, they're technically being made by the proxy user, so ident queries will not point at you.
SSL connections cannot be cached, so they are not affected by a caching proxy.