using computer for network cache?

[aodix85]

i am looking to speed up my network.  i have a computer connected directly to my router that is fairly quick and used as a file server and for bittorent and gaming primarily.  does anyone know if there is a way that i could allocate some hard drive space from this computer to act as a cache for my entire home network to speed up my connections of all devices?  i have a ramdisk that i can expand to about 16gb if that much speed is needed but i doubt it is as i have two ssds in raid0 as my main drives which are pretty quick as well.  i dont want to use pfsense as i need to have windows installed.  

 

i also have a dell e6500 laptop with linux mint and mac osx 10.7 installed on it on seperate disks, and i wouldnt mind using that for the same purpose if it is something that i could do within linux more easily but again i dont want to use pfsense and i want to continue to use my current wifi router and switch that are installed.  

 

is this even possible?

[.spider.]

Should be possible with http://www.squid-cache.org

[mariushm]

In the past, I've successfully used Proxy+ configured as a proxy server to accelerate commonly accessed websites: http://www.proxyplus.net/index.php?lang=en

 

The software installs as a Windows service and runs silently in the background and can be very easily configured through a web page, much easier than Squid or other software. The free version has some limitations (like the maximum disk space for caching content from pages) but you can find ways to remove the limitations imposed by the free version.

I'm not condoning piracy, in this case however the software seems to no longer be updated or worked on (newest versions seem to be from around 2011) so I'm not sure anyone would care about it.

 

Anyway, these days proxy servers are less and less useful, especially when websites use HTTP 2.0 (which by default uses encryption so proxies shouldn't mess with contents coming through encrypted links) or SPDY (and similar) protocols which mix html and images into single download streams that are harder to cache.

 

PS. Somewhat not related to this topic but worth mentioning. In the past, i've also used proxy software like Youngzsoft CCProxy for example, not to cache or speed up websites but to force some applications to use a particular IP address to connect to a website.

For example, let's say I rent a dedicated server that comes by default with 3 IP addresses and I want to scrape the contents from a website or use some website's API but go around certain restrictions, like allowing only one logged in user per IP address. 

In this case, I can create three accounts in the proxy server software, each account configured to bind to one out of the three IP addresses. Then, it's as simple as starting three instances of the application or browser, each configured with another account.

[aodix85]

ok very cool, thanks for the input and ideas guys i will check this stuff out and see what i can do!