I'm looking for an open-source web proxy server on Linux with the main
characteristic that it does web page caching.  It should be a small
executable and so other functionality is not needed.

In your answer, three or more choices would be great.

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Request for Question Clarification by maniac-ga on 03 Nov 2006 17:11 PST

Hello Kent_m,

Could you please clarify what you mean by "small footprint"?
Also, how important will it be to provide three or more choices.

On Linux, most proxy services are provided by "Squid"
  http://www.squid-cache.org/
with the Sun Java System Web Proxy Server
  http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=4487b1dd
a distant second. The latter is also supported only on a limited set
of Linux distributions (primarily Red Hat Enterprise Linux). There are
however, a large number of lesser know (and lesser used) products as
described at
  http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Daemons/Proxy.html
However, there may be limitations in these products that would reduce
their usefullness in your situation.

I can certainly provide an answer describing typical set ups for
either along with some suggestions on configuration. You should also
indicate if you want to set up a "transparent" proxy or a more
traditional set up.

Thanks.
  --Maniac

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Clarification of Question by kent_m-ga on 03 Nov 2006 20:20 PST

By small footprint:

The program's executables should occupy a minimal amount of space as I
only have about 4 MB of disk space to hold them.  When it is run, it
should not use much memory.  The one area that is not a concern is the
disk space for caching pages as I will have a network share.

One other thing: the proxy program should require a minimal amount of
supporting subsystems or libraries as I am running in a stripped down
Linux.

A quick look at Squid tells me it is much too large for my needs.  I
also want to go with a simple program as I will probably make mods to
it (which is why it needs to be open source).

-- Kent

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Clarification of Question by kent_m-ga on 03 Nov 2006 20:24 PST

Maniac:

For the other questions, either transparent or traditional proxy server is fine.

As for number of choices, if there really are only one or two, that is fine.

I suspect some of those in 
http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Daemons/Proxy.html would fit the bill. 
If you were to examine them for my needs and recommend several, that
would be great.  Question: do you think that the list in the above URL
is mostly complete for all available proxy servers?

-- Kent

Hello Kent,

Thank you for the clarifications.

In doing some more searches, there are lists of daemon applications
such as proxy servers at
  http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Daemons/Proxy.html
  http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/System/Daemons/Proxy/index.shtml

There is a more general list (not limited to Linux) at sites like Dmoz
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Proxying_and_Filtering/Products_and_Tools/Software/Server/
or the Google Directory
://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Proxying_and_Filtering/Products_and_Tools/Software/Server/

The next step is to determine which ones "truly" have a small
footprint and which ones are small in some aspects, but require
relatively large applications to support them.

Let's use a simple example
  http://www.accident-prone.com/trac/shrew
which as a 3.9 Kbyte download of the source. Viewing the source you
notice this is implemented in "Ruby" and requires five other packages
webrick/httpproxy, open-uri, stringio, yaml, and zlib. These packages
may also require other packages and so on. This may meet your needs,
especially if you use Ruby or these other packages in other server
applications.

A more interesting candidate is Antispyd at
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/antispyd/
This is a larger download (about 300 Kbytes) but is implemented in C
and after a review of the code does NOT appear to bring in a lot of
extra baggage.

A similar proxy server appears to be HttpGate,
  http://freshmeat.net/projects/httpgate/
but several pages on the web site currently proclaims
  "Hard Disk Borke" [sic]
Try the releases folder referred to on freshmeat (though I don't see
HttpGate there), but the author indicates it is getting recovered. If
that fails, try contacting the author (use the email address provided
at freshmeat) to get a copy.

Another small proxy is "micro_proxy" at
  http://www.acme.com/software/micro_proxy/
The files I fetched are about a year old but implement both IPV4 and
IPV6 (so it has some lifetime) network protocols, but otherwise is a
very basic application. The readme also indicates it runs under inetd
(which usually is running on Linux systems) and may have some
performance limits because of that.

Another possibility is "tinyproxy" at
  http://tinyproxy.sourceforge.net/
This appears to be under active development but is a little larger
than previous applications (about 2M after download & decompress). It
appears to be more capable in some ways (e.g., SOCKS support) but less
in others (has some filtering).

There are certainly several others that you may want to consider based
on your specific needs.

If some part of the answer is unclear or you need additional
candiates, please make a clarification request. I would be glad to
help further.

  --Maniac

Great help.  Just what I was looking for.

-- Kent