If you are on a dialup connection, installing squid, a caching proxy is highly recommended. It's caching abilities are far better and faster then Netscape could ever dream of. Installing Squid is the cheapest and fastest way to speed up a slow network connection.

Installing the Squid Package

If you are running YellowDog Linux or LinuxPPC, put the CD in the drive. Become root. Type mount /mnt/cdrom; rpm -ivh /mnt/cdrom/squid*ppc.rpm into a xterm. This will install the package.

If you are using Debian, it's even simpler, just run apt-get install squid.

Configuring Netscape to Use Squid

Start up Netscape Communicator.

Open up the Preferences (It's found in Edit -> Preferences). Expand the Advanced item, by clicking the arrow. Click on Proxies.

Choose manual proxy configuration. Click Select. A new dialog will appear containing proxy information..

Put in the box next to 'HTTP Proxy:' the number 127.0.0.1. That tells Netscape the proxy is your own machine. Replace this with another machine name, if it's running not running on your own machine.

In the next box over, labeled 'Port' put in 3128.

Click Cache. Change the disk cache to 0 k and the memory cache to 0 k. Press clear memory cache, then press clear disk cache.

If all went well, then Netscape should be able to browse the web, using Squid. You can prove it is running squid by going to a non-existing domain (like ). As Squid isn't allowed yet to talk to your machine (localhost/127.0.0.1), it will give an error about Access denied.

Configuring Squid to Allow Localhost Access

Squid currently lacks permission to allow you to see any pages. Adding the following linesto /etc/squid.conf (dpkg) or /etc/squid/squid.conf (rpm) will allow you to use it:

http_access allow all

Important: This line should be at the top of the http_access section of squid.conf. You can safely use this

It is not recommended that you change Squid's memory usage settings. The default should work fine, as Squid uses malloc() to use only avaliable free memory, which is marked cache (and will be purged as other programs need it).

Try Netscape out now. It should work!

Some Other Notes

Take a look at the offical . Remember, as this cache will be running on a local machine, and only handleing local requests, memory use and CPU requirements are far less then recommended in the offical manual (it assumes you are using Squid for a Network Cache, not a local cache).

If you are into Network Proxies, check out Junkbuster Howto.

If this works well for you, and really speeds up your net connection or if you see mistakes, let me know at .