No, this is not an exotic seafood/glass recipe.

Yesterday (well, Tuesday evening) I was sent down to Poole to set up a caching proxy server for a customer... on Windows. Working with a Microsoft operating system is a little bit unusual in my open source support job, but hey, it pays the bills.

It turned out to be surprisingly easy (or rather, my preparation had been sufficiently thorough). We'd budgeted the entire day to set things up - but I had Squid running by 9:20am, and was authenticating against Active Directory by 10am (with a choice of methods; single-sign on with NTLM or prompting the user for credentials). So we had coffee. By 11am there was log rotation and we had tweaked the config file, and by 12pm there were HTML reports of all the accesses (which was originally going to be the optional bonus if-we-had-time feature). So we had some more coffee, and I caught an early train home.

We should add Windows to our squid commercial support page. I wonder how many more potential enterprise business customers there are - Squid is of course an excellent replacement for Microsoft ISA Server.