I'm new to Linux and I'm running Mandrake version 9.0. I've got squid and squidguard installed. Here is what I want to be able to do, but I'm not exactly sure how to do it...

I have many computers which need to download daily data updates. The updates can be large and over a slow connection I'd rather not have 10 downloads. I've started to set up squid as a cache.

Now, here's the logic I'm hoping to be able to impliment.

Have one machine be able to access an external site daily and download the database update file. From that point on all other machines (which can be in a list of special IPs) can get the data ONLY from the cache.

For example mach (ip 192.168.0.200) would need access to the outside. All other machines (ip 192.168.0.201-211) would need to only hit from the cache. I'd like to be able to clear the cache every day, and until the .200 machine downloads the data the other machines get errors reported back.

Is this possible to do with squid/squidguard? It seems like both tools can do parts of the problem I'm just unsure how exactly to set it up.

Or.... if there's a better way I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

I would do it with the server

download the site with wget to a folder on your webserver or ftp server.

you can use a cron job to download it when you want it there, and also a cron job to delete it.

That might work, I'll have to check on that. At the moment I'm not (knowingly) running apache or any other server on the linux box.

The system requesting the data is an embedded system we are running to control scheduling of transportation systems operators. I'm not sure if I can have the computer mimic one of these systems. It seems very possible, let me check on that. The real key is I don't have control over the software on the boxes requesting the data, just the network. The boxes support a proxy, so squid/squidguard seemed like a very obvious solution *but I could very easily be wrong!*

Wget seems very useful tool, I'll look into it.

Thanks.