Aside

In my house I’ve got an old workstation that has a lot of storage available and that I thought would be the best place to fire up that iCloud cache service in System Preferences > Sharing? It used to require macOS Server, but any ol’ macOS since High Sierra can do it.

If you don’t know what the service does, it’s a clever way Apple lets you stash OS updates and iCloud user data in safely encrypted blobs on your local network. So once I pull a macOS software update from the Internet (really probably an Akamai system like Apple does) or an iOS update or my Documents folder syncs up β€”Β it can reconcile/validate/download from a local system instead of going off to the Internet and fetching yet another multi-gigabyte file.

Anyway, I checked in on it the other day just to see some idea of how useful it is and I was pretty impressed:

iCloud Content Cache is Great

Link

SquidMan

SquidMan
SquidMan

SquidMan is cuter and much less dangerous than Cthulhu, and simplifies installation and management of a Squid caching proxy server that you can use locally or make available to other users.

Use case: Household web cache to accelerate browsing for all devices and computers, and also improve privacy by configuring Squid to intercept requests destined for analytics providers, and to ensure web browsers are benefiting from other compliance tools like DNS sinkholes to known-malicious addresses.