Book Image

Squid Proxy Server 3.1: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Squid Proxy Server 3.1: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Squid Proxy Server enables you to cache your web content and return it quickly on subsequent requests. System administrators often struggle with delays and too much bandwidth being used, but Squid solves these problems by handling requests locally. By deploying Squid in accelerator mode, requests are handled faster than on normal web servers making your site perform quicker than everyone else's! Squid Proxy Server 3.1 Beginner's Guide will help you to install and configure Squid so that it is optimized to enhance the performance of your network. The Squid Proxy Server reduces the amount of effort that you will have to put in, saving your time to get the most out of your network. Whether you only run one site, or are in charge of a whole network, Squid is an invaluable tool that improves performance immeasurably. Caching and performance optimization usually requires a lot of work on the developer's part, but Squid does all that for you. This book will show you how to get the most out of Squid by customizing it for your network. You will learn about the different configuration options available and the transparent and accelerated modes that enable you to focus on particular areas of your network. Applying proxy servers to large networks can be a lot of work as you have to decide where to place restrictions and who should have access, but the straightforward examples in this book will guide you through step by step so that you will have a proxy server that covers all areas of your network by the time you finish the book.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Squid Proxy Server 3.1 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – downloading Squid


Now we are going to download Squid 3.1.10 from Squid's official website:

  1. Let's go to the web page http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/.

  2. Now we need to click on the link to Version 3.1, as shown in the following screenshot:

  3. We'll be taken to a page displaying the various releases in version 3.1. The link with the display text tar.gz in the Download column is a link to the compressed source archive for Squid release 3.1.10, as shown in the following screenshot:

  4. To download Squid 3.1.10 using the web browser, just click on the link.

  5. Alternatively, we can use wget to download the source archive from the command line as follows:

    wget http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v3/3.1/squid-3.1.10.tar.gz
    

What just happened?

We successfully retrieved Squid version 3.1.10 from Squid's official website. The process of retrieving other stable or beta versions is very similar.

Obtaining the latest source code from Bazaar VCS

Advanced users may be interested in getting the very latest source code from the Squid code repository, using Bazaar. We can safely skip this section if we are not familiar with VCS in general. Bazaar is a popular version control system used to track project history and facilitate collaboration. From version 3.x onwards, Squid source code has been migrated to Bazaar. Therefore, we should ensure that we have Bazaar installed on our system in order to checkout the source code from repository. To find out more about Bazaar or for Bazaar installation and configuration manuals, please visit Bazaar's official website at http://bazaar.canonical.com/.

Once we have setup Bazaar, we should head to the Squid code repository mirrored on Launchpad at https://code.launchpad.net/squid/. From here we can browse all the versions and branches of Squid. Let's get ourselves familiar with the page layout:

In the previous screenshot, Series: trunk represents the development branch, which contains code that is still in development and is not ready for production use. The branches with the status Mature are stable and can be used right away in production environments.