Web Caching

The Bottom Line

If you are thinking about deploying a web caching service for your organization, do not discount the difficulties of configuring the clients. Small organizations, or those where using the proxy is optional, might be able to use manual configuration. Large organizations probably want to use proxy auto-configuration scripts, however. If you do not want your employees or customers to configure their own browsers, you need to preconfigure them or use some other technique to change the settings without the user’s intervention. Both Netscape and Microsoft have freely available toolkits that allow organizations to distribute browsers with customized settings.

The web proxy auto-discovery protocol looks like a very promising method to eliminate that final, time-consuming configuration hassle. Even so, many organizations are not entirely comfortable with proxy auto-configuration, and they have instead turned to interception caching because it requires no browser configuration whatsoever. Furthermore, it works with all web clients, not just the most popular browsers. Interception caching is becoming increasingly prevalent because it makes administrator’s lives easier, but not everyone embraces it so openly. The issues and technologies around interception caching are discussed in Chapter 5.