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

Access control lists


Access Control Lists (ACLs) are the base elements for access control and are normally used in combination with other directives such as http_access, icp_access, and so on, to control access to various Squid components and web resources. ACLs identify a web transaction and then directives such as http_access, cache, and then decides whether the transaction should be allowed or not. Also, we should note that the directives related to accessing resources generally end with _access.

Every access control list definition must have a name and type, followed by the values for that particular ACL type:

acl ACL_NAME ACL_TYPE value
acl ACL_NAME ACL_TYPE "/path/to/filename"

The values for any ACL name can either be specified directly after ACL_TYPE or Squid can read them from a separate file. Here we should note that the values in the file should be written as one value per line.