Hi,

I would like to set up a dedicated machine to place between my network and the internet to do buffering, intrusion detection, firewall, scheduled downloads, etc.
I built the computer (an extremely low power 2Ghz 4 core with 16G RAM, and small SSD, and put debian linux on it),
and thought one ethernet port should go to the router (for its' firewall, router goes to the modem and the internet), and the other to the switch to the internal network. The first part I want to get working is the buffer. After doing some reading, I think that SQUID should be able to do this as an accelerator as a transparent proxy.
Unfortunately I can not seem to get it to work, at all. I do not have any real networking experience to draw on... so anything that would point me in the right direction would be appreciated... even something like get and read book xxx ... Or maybe I am attempting to use the wrong software, Or ???

If I need to post this to a different forum, please let me know that.

Thanks!

If you understand network protocols generally, Ip ranges, subnet masks, gateways and bridges. What you're effectively doing at the simplest level is creating a bridge between two private networks (the one from your internet router to your proxy and then a second from your proxy to your internal network). You'd have to understand under what conditions those two networks would be segregated, how to assign them gateways and then how to bridge the two networks at the proxy server.
Your friends at Debian have set up a convenient, distro specific HOWTO on that topic for you.
The rest is just configuring SQUID to do what you want it to do.