Information Technology Publishing, the largest business and consumer magazine publisher in the Middle East, with more than 50 market-leading titles covering almost all major areas of interest, has implemented a Linux based caching proxy and Internet gateway solution from Network Gulf at their Dubai head office.
The company with more tha 400 users - majority of them very active Internet users- had been expanding rapidly in the recent past. Meeting the connectivity requirements has been a major headache for the system admins who had to juggle around with many separate Internet connections including leased line and ADSL businessone connections.
The existing Winproxy implementations were showing their limitations the admins were finding it very difficult to implement management Internet access policies and manage precious bandwidth.
W hen Mr.Subahar approched Network Gulf for a slolution, our consultants were confident of delivering one given the large number of tools on offer in the Linux and Open source arena.
After more than two weeks of development, testing and implementation, ITP has migrated two of it's Internet connections (one leased line and one ADSL) to a Linux based proxy server.
Apart from providing web proxy and caching, the solution ties the two Internet connections to provide a unified management interface. The traffic is distributed between the interfaces based on a weightage decided by the administrator.
The solution was developed on a Redhat platform and included the following opensource projects - Squid, IP tables, IP route,Webmin etc. The main features of the solution included the following
- Peformance improvement and saving bandwidth by Webpage caching, Blocking of adservers, Limiting size of downloads and Blocking downloads by file type.
- Enforcement of corporate Internet access policies using squid ACLs.
- Time based restrictions
- Load balancing between multiple Internet gateways.
- Transparent proxy for ease of client administration.