[Server-devel] wwwoffle?

[Dan Zubey]

On 02/22/2011 07:59 AM, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> At first reading, I'm realizing that there's many things I don't know
> about wwwoffle!
>
>   - Current rpms are available, but not in Fedora.
> http://www.google.com/search?q=wwwoffle+rpm+2.9 so we'd need to review
> the spec and see if Fedora is interested in carrying it...
>
I referenced the ubuntu init.d file as a model. There was a lot of stuff 
in there for different offline
search engines, among other things. It brought to light a lot of 
situations that I hadn't thought of, and integrated into the script.
>   - So xs-config will likely contain /etc/xs-wwwoffle files and an
> /etc/init.d/xs-wwwoffle init script that points to that directory (and
> /var/cache/xs-wwwoffle, etc). All of this can be modelled on what's in
> the rpm.
>

There were some custom ubuntu/debian binaries to handle cert generation 
and other tasks that I ran into. In order to keep any random system 
utility binaries from breaking, I had the xs-wwwoffle script back up 
/etc/wwwoffle and link it to /etc/xs-wwwoffle.

I don't pretend we'd ever get all the special cases handled, so hence 
the tendency to force the system to use our config file and directory.
>   - wwwoffle does act as a normal proxy too when online... but can't
> handle the switching between modes, is that right? So it seems we'll
> need a "controller" daemon that monitors whether we have uplink or
> not, and switches wwwoffle between modes.
>
That's what this script does. I did not use the facility to have pppd 
set wwwoffle online, instead I opted for a check to see if the machine 
was online in *any* way at all, and then control wwwoffle.
> This script is probably the interesting part. Maybe there's something
> interesting in the rpm init script that we can copy or reuse. It'll
> probably need to handle
>
>   - online / offline cases in a "pure wwwoffle" case
>
>   - "wwwoffle + conventional online proxy" case, where when online we
> just call wwwoffle --fetch. Note that the conventional proxy may not
> be squid ;-)
>
In the case where there's another proxy, our setup wouldn't affect 
normal operation at all. But then if a user is advanced enough to 
install another proxy, they would know how to adjust wwwoffle's settings 
as well.

I gotta say...I've run a number of proxies, and squid has been the most 
efficient and configurable. I use it at home and get a very high hit 
rate. There are other proxies, apache comes up on the list, but squid 
really takes the cake. It's a shame it didn't preform well in low memory 
environments.

-Dan