Dialup connections can be frustrating. Squid, a very popular
piece of ‘net caching software does a lot to cut bandwidth demands,
but it isn’t built for dialups. This article shows how to change
that:
“One of the more frequent requests on the Squid mailing
lists is for help configuring Squid to operate well on dial-up or
demand-dial networks. Offline mode will function for some of these
networks, but is far from ideal. Unfortunately many of the features
of Squid’s offline mode appear to have largely vanished during the
development of the Squid 2.x series. In the 2.3 STABLE 4 version,
the offline mode has nearly no effect at all.Squid can be patched to work well with dial-up and other
intermittent connections. Having a cache on the intermittent side
of the link can take some of the curse off these connections,
providing access to cached information and reducing bandwidth use
on the link. Unpatched, Squid can work reasonably well on
dial-on-demand connections, but dialing in each time it needs to
resolve a query can become expensive.Squid is designed for permanent connections. Making Squid work
on intermittent connections requires changing how Squid handles
stale web pages and stale DNS lookups.”