I’ve seen many a post from people who claim that windows update cannot be cached. It can, and does work well.

There is several things you must consider however, and these are new things to look at.

You very well might not be able to cache every single chunk of every file. For what reasons, I do not know yet. Microsoft seems to use a split file format now for many of it’s new releases and in many cases you will not be able to cache the very last chunk of a file.

The key to the whole affair is to use refresh patterns to instruct squid what to do. Yes, squid is the proxy you should use to do this.

In particular you should use squid in a transparent nature, which imho is the only way to run a proxy. Who likes having to remember to disable a proxy when a machine leaves a repair bench.

The results can be dramatic: Even with the fastest cable/dsl connection, it cannot keep up with squid running.

With a SMP machine, and a fast hard drive (or lots of memory) you can hit download speeds in excess of 50 megabits. Sure, some of you may have a cable connection that says 50 megabits but how often do you hit that on a microsoft site in the middle of the day, or during peak times?