pfsense + squid, worth it?

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edc

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#230671 7-Mar-2018 22:27

Would it be worthwhile installing squid on a pfsense box if the connection is fibre, ~10ms ping Wellington to Auckland, ~950 Mbps down, ~450 Mbps up?

There are 4 people in the apartment only. The box is a AMD A6-6400K APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, 32GB DDR3 RAM, Intel-82571EB-Gigabit-Ethernet-Controller https://ark.intel.com/products/20720/Intel-82571EB-Gigabit-Ethernet-Controller. I'd put the cache in a ramdisk, say about 26GB and limit the cache size to 25GB.

I'd enable it as a transparent proxy, and don't want to specify it as an explicit proxy, nor have to deal with people telling me website x isn't working anymore.

Since the box is working well atm, I don't want to enable something without first asking around. I read some of the pfsense forums and reddit and it seems like squid isn't going to be of much use?

marpada

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#1970930 7-Mar-2018 22:32

Most traffic these days is https so I don't think a transparent proxy will be much help.

sbiddle

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#1971013 8-Mar-2018 08:07

What are you trying to achieve?

jnimmo

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#1971021 8-Mar-2018 08:19

I would suggest it won't add any value. 40 users maybe, but who is your ISP as they may already be caching for you

sbiddle

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#1971022 8-Mar-2018 08:36

marpada:

Most traffic these days is https so I don't think a transparent proxy will be much help.

Squid does cache SSL now but only if you install the SSL module and then install your own CA root certs on each device that is connected to support MITM interception.

wratterus

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#1971034 8-Mar-2018 09:15

With a connection that fast, and the low number of users, it's probably not worth the effort. Maybe just get a good router if you don't have one already?

macuser

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#1971041 8-Mar-2018 09:32

sbiddle:

marpada:

Most traffic these days is https so I don't think a transparent proxy will be much help.

Squid does cache SSL now but only if you install the SSL module and then install your own CA root certs on each device that is connected to support MITM interception.

That's a lot of effort though, and don't you get a bunch of chrome security errors now with MITM?

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hio77

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#1971083 8-Mar-2018 10:38

Given you have a gbit connection why bother?

i ran squid on mine when i was stuck on a 2mbit link, soon as i jumped to dual 20mbit links it proved to be an adherence rather than an improvement

I was running this on a RAID 0 array with 16GB ram dedicated to the squid instance

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sbiddle

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#1971098 8-Mar-2018 10:48

macuser:

sbiddle:

marpada:

Most traffic these days is https so I don't think a transparent proxy will be much help.

Squid does cache SSL now but only if you install the SSL module and then install your own CA root certs on each device that is connected to support MITM interception.

That's a lot of effort though, and don't you get a bunch of chrome security errors now with MITM?

I would imagine so since the idea of those security warnings is to warn of things such as a MITM attack that people may be oblivious to.

dt

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#1971111 8-Mar-2018 11:04

I ran squid for a while on my pfsense router and the difference it made was virtually unnoticeable.. my negligible difference though is that i'm in Auckland.

Side question, running anything else on that hardware? 32gb is a lot if its just for pfsense.

muppet

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#1971273 8-Mar-2018 15:00

Basically pointless.

Most people don't even bother running squid etc in large organisations anymore.

edc

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#1972400 10-Mar-2018 16:19

dt:

I ran squid for a while on my pfsense router and the difference it made was virtually unnoticeable.. my negligible difference though is that i'm in Auckland.

Side question, running anything else on that hardware? 32gb is a lot if its just for pfsense.

Thank you all for the feedback and good advice, I decided not to go with it.

It has 32GB since I thought I might run squid on it. The last time I had my own Internet connection was in dial-up times and with data caps.

The pfsense box is the router, my R7000 router maxes out at 400 up and 400 down.