Design of the Visualized Assistant for the Management of Proxy Server

Abstract

A proxy cache has quite a few difficult jobs to do. It is hard for people to effectively and efficiently do the maintenance work needless of mentioning the performance tuning work. In this paper we study the widely used proxy caching server--Squid. It suffers with well-designed tool to the management or evaluation of its performance or capability, which motivates us to design and implement friendly interfaces to relief the management work. On the other hand, these also help to support the evaluation or study of the proxy caching work. We study the public domain Squid proxy server first to find out what we could take advantage of. Then, we design and implement three visual interfaces to the management work of the proxy server. To support the visualization interface, we integrate the MRTG with the interface. We design and implement three different management assistants. They are SNMP agent, the interception of the run-time internal object and the instantaneously analysis of the log file. Each approach has its own limitation and fitness for specific circumstance. They make it easier to the maintenance work of the proxy cache server as well as the study or evaluation of them. Section 2 describes the usage of SNMP agent to the monitoring of the proxy server. Section 3 explains how to intercept the run-time internal object of Squid. Section 4 describes the simultaneously parsing of the access log file. We continue to discuss the situation or circumstance to apply one of the alternative choices. Finally, we point out the future work to be continued.