web proxy (I think)?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 03:33:21PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> hi there,
> 
> here's my situation:
> 
> I have a classroom of 15 pc's networked together via a 24-port
> ethernet hub (well, haven't done the networking yet, but it looks to
> be easy).  No internet in the classroom.
> 
> I want to teach students how to use the internet with their brand new
> machines; also I want to upgrade their systems from Ubuntu warty to
> Ubuntu hoary, using a mirrored repository I've got on a spare IDE hard
> drive, which still has lots of space on it.  
> 
> here's my thought:
> 
> copy a big chunk of internet to my hd, alongside the ubuntu mirror.
> Then install the hd as hdb on a computer that will be used as a router for
> the network (note: is it hard to set up a router?).  Then use some
> kind of system to redirect calls to internet sites to the files that
> have been stored on this hd.  
> 
> is this called web proxying?  Or caching or redirecting or something?
> anyway, that's what I want to do.  Also I would like to fool the local
> machines into thinking that my ubuntu repository is in fact the one
> that's pointed to in their apt-get ocnfiguration files.  

No not really, I think it's called copying the contents of a stie to a
local web server and making it respond to the request for the original
hostname.

You can use the virtual hosts in apache to serve each of the hostnames
you are mirroring data from.  wget is handy for making copies of some
sections of a web server.

> THe idea is to change almost nothing on the client machines, and do
> all the work on the router.  So I guess I would need:
> 
> *DNS -- any suggestions for something light?

Use bind9.  It works.  Everyone knows how it works.  It is simple to
use.

> *DHCP -- that should be easy I reckon.  Would be nice if folks could
> talk to each other's machines using the locally-defined client
> names.  

The names would be a problem for DNS.  DHCP should just point them at
the right nameserver IP.

> *Webcrawling Proxy thaingamajig.  I've seen the name "Squid" tossed
> around.  Is that the right tool for the job?  

I think the righ solution is apache with a copy of what you want to
serve, and then updating the clients to use the new machine's ip as
their package source either though faking the entry on the DNS to the
local server's ip, or updating the clients to use the local name of the
server.

> so, any ideas or solutions?  

Lennart Sorensen
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