Untangle!

The upcoming, soon-to-be-released, Version 8.1 of Untangle, which (as you may have guessed), inspired the naming of this blog, is finally going to be released... It's undergoing final testing, and the one aspect that I've seen in similar products (such as IPCOP, and similar), is finally being included.

Web Caching!

They just finished the plugin and everything... this is awesome.

What's the big deal? (you may ask) ... well, Web Caching, is something that your browser does automatically. It pulls a page down, and saves it, and if you're like me and keep reloading contect from the same pages over and over, over the course of a few hours, then the browser just reloads the content it already has, rather than download everything all over and over again.

You just said computers already do this, why is this a big deal at all?

... well curious reader, Untangle is a routing system, so it replaces the in-house router in your home (Kind of like a d-link or linksys system), however, because it's a full-fledged computer system it has a lot more options available. Web caching at the router means that if you're sitting at home, and you have guests in your house, and you see that picture that makes you "ZOMG SO AWESOME!!!111one", and you send it to everyone else in the house (presuming you're like me and all your friends bring laptops to your house), then it just reloads from the copy stored on the router.

ALSO, if you're like me, this is important because bandwidth is expensive. So rather than downloading the same content 5 or 6 times, it can be downloaded once from the internet, the router intercepts the requests and responds with the locally cached version. This saves you bandwidth, and probably more importantly, saves you time. As long as it's implemented right, the local web cache is much faster than most web server's response times, and it's much faster at transferring to you than it would be through the web.

Best example of the positive contribution to bandwidth is Windows Updates!! the dreaded evil things. They go out all the time and annoy you constantly saying they need to install, reboot, etc. Now, with web caching, those updates are stored locally on the router, so when your computer goes to download them (sometimes several hundred MB in size) it simply retrieves it from the router, which goes faster, so updating is less painful (but still painful), and it doesn't cost you in your monthly usage (eg update size times number of systems).

This is surely an exciting time, and I think I'll have to dust off one of my old P4 units and reinstall this new version of Untangle...

if you havn't heard of them or used them yet, check them out at http://www.untangle.com/