Cachelink - Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Cachelink saves time by accessing web pages from other Cachelink users on your LAN rather than from the Internet. The Internet is full of bottlenecks, all the way from your Internet connection to distant web servers. By accessing pages from your LAN, Cachelink avoids Internet bottlenecks.
If you have a high-speed connection to the Internet, Cachelink saves you time when accessing busy or slow web servers. If you have a slower connection to the Internet, Cachelink will save you even more time. In our testing, we access pages up to 40 times faster through Cachelink Pro than through our T1 link.
Cachelink can access any web content that another Cachelink user on your LAN has accessed, as long as that content is "cacheable", has not "expired", and came from an open (not secure) connection.
Whether content is "cacheable" and how content "expires" is controlled by the creator of the web content. Cachelink conforms to all HTTP standards for observing content cache-ability and expiration.
Regardless of how you connect to the Internet - via a modem, a DSL link, or a T1 - your connection has a limited amount of bandwidth. Also, Internet servers and the Internet itself have limited bandwidth, regardless of the speed of your link. As servers, the Internet, or your connection reach their capacity, your access to web pages slows down.
Cachelink helps you make the most of the bandwidth that you've got by fetching web pages quickly from your LAN, without adding to the congestion on your Internet connection or the Internet. In addition, by keeping your Internet connection clearer, Cachelink makes more bandwidth available for other users or for other applications, such as Internet radio, Internet telephone, etc.
Cachelink does not provide any tools for monitoring your browsing, but Cachelink also does not interfere with any monitoring tools that may be in use at your organization.
In addition, content that you access will not be stored on anyone else's computer - if you're the first Cachelink user to visit a web page, that page will be stored on your computer.
No. As long as you use only secure connections (HTTPS) when you send this data over the Internet, Cachelink does not expose this information.
Cachelink will automatically configure Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4, 5, and 6 and Netscape Navigator versions 4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, and 6.
To view details about the settings that Cachelink automatically configures, click here.
Yes. However, you must configure other browsers manually in exactly the same way as you would configure them to use a proxy server. For Cachelink, set the browser to use 127.0.0.1 as the HTTP proxy server address and 8080 as the HTTP proxy server port.
Also, if you already have a proxy server in-house that you'd like to use with Cachelink, specify the proxy server's address and port on the Cachelink configuration utility's "Advanced" page. This is not necessary if you are using IE and Netscape - Cachelink will automatically configure itself to use your existing proxy server.
To view detailed instructions on configuring your web browser, click here.
Yes. Cachelink has been thoroughly tested to work across all combinations of Windows 95, 98, Me, NT and 2000.
No. Web content accessed over your LAN through Cachelink is web content that you would have had to access over your LAN without Cachelink. Cachelink introduces only an extremely small amount of additional local LAN traffic to access content over your LAN.
We've already tested Cachelink with over 100 computers on the same LAN combining their web caches and it works great! We'll be testing it with more and more and more.
Yes. Cachelink works transparently through firewalls and proxy servers with no impact on their effectiveness. In fact, if you are using IE or Netscape, Cachelink automatically configures itself to work with existing proxy servers in your network. If you are using another browser, follow the directions above.
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