Proxy for a home network

Question

What would be a good proxy for a home network?

1. I'd like to install the software proxy on 1 machine and to share it across my LAN
2. how can I configure my Linux Ubuntu machines to use the proxy just for specific domains? (e.g. www.gravatar.com)

Answer 1

Firstly, How many users are we talking about?

As suggested by Arcath, Squid is the de factor standard these days for open source caching proxies. Various add-on packages allow content filtering and several programs have been make to do fancy reporting against Squid's logs.

A good lightweight caching proxy is Polipo. It's not the fanciest thing in the world, but it's small, fast, and should work well enough for a handful of users.

Concerning your second question, Squid's ACL functions can be used for caching only certain sites. I'm not sure why you'd go through the trouble of setting up a proxy but not want the clients to take full advantage of it, though.

Answer 2

Squid is a rather good proxy, the wikipedia article might be a good resource http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_%28software%29

Answer 3

If you want a proxy for apt updates, look at apt-cacher-ng. I used that on my cluster at work.

The other answers are for general-purpose HTTP proxies that don't specifically know about Packages.gz, Releases, and .deb files. apt-cacher-ng uses that for cache staleness decisions.

Answer 4

I believe you can use the Firefox add-on, FoxyProxy, to cause Firefox to use the proxy just for certain domains.