Managing Duplicate Downloads

Question

At my firm, we mostly self-administer software installations on our individual machines. Often several users download the same file. Is there a tool which can be used to cache downloads and queue new download requests? I am looking for a solution where the user is informed about a previously downloaded copy if one exists locally but still allows the user to download a new copy from the Internet if he so chooses. Does such a tool exist?

Edit: Why the downvote/close? Not programming related? Isn't this a problem shared by a lot of development teams?

Answer 1

You are probably looking for a caching HTTP proxy, like SQUID. In my experience, properly configured it can be helpful even for large installations, like Debian Linux, (~2GB download) though for Debian case there are specialized tools like apt-cache.