Apple Caching server is a very cool idea. I am not a big apple fan, so I don’t know exactly how it works. From what I have seen, you install the software on a server. Apple servers cache apps and files that many devices will ask for, therefore when one user downloads a file it caches it on the local servers. When another user coming from the same public IP address downloads that same file, it pulls it from the caching server thus eliminating the bandwidth need.
Apple has a run down of exactly what happens:
http://help.apple.com/serverapp/mac/3.0/help/#apdC36C9994-1533-4DCB-9CFF-870CB0FADCDB
But how do you make sure Apple caching is working correctly in your network. By default everything should flow out of your default nat policy – but what if you have a bunch of different nats?
you want to make sure that your caching server and clients are seen by apple as the same IP address.
I do this this through a internal to wan policy and make sure that anything going to 17.0.0.0/8 (apple owns this whole block) and anything going to .apple.com goes out of the same policy.
you can do this with a Address object, and firewall policy to go out via that policy.
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