For the Curious ...

Hey There, Today I was thrown with this task of making sure that all our proxies in my company have the same White and the Black List. The company already has the List of category that they block, with a standard squid.conf and sfagent, Now they want to go ahead and block a website or allow it in less than 30 minutes all over the company. If it is small number of proxies then I can guess this can be manual, but in our company, we have greater than 150 proxies which are a mix of Bluecoat and squid. Bluecoats, it was very easy by using the central policy concept, for the squids, I decided that we should create a script that goes ahead and makes changes the squid.conf file adds a crontab, so on and so forth. So I used the same Webserver, which the company was  using for the Bluecoat central policies and made a blocked list and allowed list text files. Then I created a shell script installer, which when run in our company environment, will modify the squid.conf file adding references of th...

Hi There, Its been a long time since i have posted something here, owing to the fact that I was busy in the monotonous work. Anycase, todays topic is how the browser works, I am amazed at how many people take it for granted and don't really understand the basics behind it, Like the way I like it, lets start with some practical stuff then I will explain what we did in the exercise. This is what you need , (Assuming you are reading this, you will have them) 1. PC connected to the Internet directly, without using a Explicit proxy (Transparent Proxies are ok), How to Check : On Windows: If you don't know if your PC is proxied or not, a good way to check is your Internet Explorer, Go to Tools --> Internet Options --> Connections Click on the LAN Settings button, Make sure there is nothing checked, if you are able to browse internet, means you either have no proxy or a transparent proxy (Both are OK) On Linux: If you use Linux, you might already know how to do it ... But here i...