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 – compiling the source


After specifying our environment and building the requirements, we need to do the actual compilation. Compiling source code is very easy and is a matter of just one command:

make

We do not need to be the root or super user to execute this command. This command may take a considerable amount of time to execute, depending on the system hardware. Running make will produce a lot of output in the terminal. It may also produce a lot of compiler warnings which can safely be ignored in most cases.

If make ends with errors, we should check Squid bugzilla for similar problems. We can update an existing bug with our error report or create a new bug report if there is no similar bug already. For details on troubleshooting and completing bug reports, please refer to Chapter 12, Troubleshooting Squid.

If make ends without any errors, we can quickly proceed to the installation phase. We can also run make again to verify that everything is compiled successfully. Running make again should produce a lot of lines similar to the following:

Making all in compat
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/user/squid-source/compat'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'all'.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/user/squid-source/compat'

What just happened?

We have just run the make command that will compile the source code of Squid and related modules, to generate executables, if it finishes without errors. The generated executables are ready to be installed now.