Industry Forums > Wireless Service Providers > Appliansys Cachebox

Appliansys Cachebox

I am
I use the cachebox 050

Wonderful piece of equipment.

I Put it in place of a squid box with cachevideos.com on top.

I can provide some screenshots if you want.
Today from midnight to 5.30pm (before the peak in the evening) so far its served 7,192mb and only requested 5,564mb from the internet, so 1,628mb was served from the cache. Thats 22%.

Hi Ray,

Are you using this together with Squid + CacheVideos.com?

What is the stack order when you are using this?

I am thinking to evaluate the 050 or 100 for our WISP here.

Thanks!

reply to zrob_12
I also will like to know how is that you have it? I am planning to do something similar.

Allan

reply to zrob_12
I am currently trialing one from a colleague which i have had on my network for a couple of months. I am going to be purchasing it at the end of Janurary.

There are a number of scenarios you can use.
I have it behind my main router - though you can ease its use, by using a microtik or another router, with a transparent proxy built in, which will redirect http traffic only through the cachebox.

The 050 is really designed for corporate networks. I have a school educational edition - i dont know what the differences are between what the basic features of the school one compared to the corporate firmware are - but they both cache youtube / major video sites, and http so it suits me perfectly.

I will probably go for the 050 but buy a bigger one as i grow (currently at 60 customers, can probably easily handle 100+), and move the 050 to another part of my network. You can set them up for clustering.

I'll see if i can login now and get some screenshots. If i can remember my password.

reply to zrob_12

Ray - what issues have you experienced? I'm really close to purchasing one of these, but I haven't found a lot of reviews besides those that Appliansys provides.

reply to zrob_12
Few things

Setting up initially, I couldnt get it to transparently cache - only by setting the proxy in my browser. I somehow fixed this by adding port 80 to listen as the proxy server inside the cachebox

The reports dont properly work inside the device - seems to have issues rendering the java graphs. I cant be bothered asking them to fix these. I just installed one at another wisp network today and it worked fine so i know its probably a simple fault with my unit.

Incidentally i did notice that the 100 model has 3x lan ports. And it supports fully transparent bridging like a network switch, and the cachebox will intercept this traffic even without being set as a gateway or anything on the client devices. I havent tested this further, just saw it as an option.

The support is really good. You give them telnet/SSH access to the device, and they can login and fix stuff.

One problem i initially had was it was downloading files that were aborted by the client. Eg. someone starts watching a youtube video, decides they dont like it so they close it, but the cachebox would finish off the download. This ment it was using more data than it was serving.

So to solve this, they logged in via SSH and disabled aggressive mode which instantly changed things for me.

The devices are super simple to setup and for me it makes a good difference in the congested times in the evening. Customers dont complain that facebook or trademe are going slow because half the website is being served by the cachebox.

reply to zrob_12
I wish I could buy the cachebox and do youtube as well for now I been testing untangle cache and works just fine in bridge mode, it dosent do videos, but I maybe I can put another box with cachevideos and only send to that box youtube and other video websites.

I would avoid the cachevideos script - its not worth it.

The annual 12 month cachebox subscription is less than a 6 month subscription to the cachevideos script.

With the cachevideos script, whenever youtube updates their url formats inside the flash player, you have to manually download an update and install it on the squid box. This usually means by the time they release the new version, its 2 days without caching, or excess downloading by the squid box.

The cachebox hasnt needed updating since it was installed, where as the cachevideos script is poorly managed. For example, I had to request a fix because youtube changed its format. He sent me a fixed script of a previous version with less features, rather than fixing the current script.

Cachebox seems to be immune to youtube's changes and just carries on working.

Thanks for letting me know about cachevideos.com, I am just going to install untangle cache, and maybe later I can buy the cachebox

Hello everyone, I really dont recommend you buy cachebox from appliansys. I can tell you that their software got lots of bug and they only got 3 engineers in the whole company (total 30 people in the company, coventry). I think you should consider other options and really, dont waste your money.

Can you please tell us more about these bugs you have found?

The cachevideos.com script has one guy (engineer) who does the support and design. So appliansys with three engineers must be better than that.

I know one of the appliansys consultants who lives about 2 hours from me seems to be pretty switched on when it comes to this sort of stuff.

If you think about it - you really only need three engineers. On shifts of 8 hours each, they can take turns and instantly roll out updates as needed.

reply to zrob_12
Does anyone know the prices of these devices ?

reply to zrob_12
$1962 USD for the 050
Includes 12 months of upgrade support.

reply to zrob_12
Can this be a competiotor product for Bluecoat Cacheflow or am I comparing apples to oranges ?

There is a huge price difference in between.

reply to zrob_12
I ended up purchasing a Cachebox 230. Integrations was pretty seamless and I estimate that I am saving 10-20% of bandwith during peak hours. Also, the latency to many cached pages is much better than if they were pulled directly from the site.

In sum, I am very satisfied with my purchase and would recommend the product.