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 – building ACL lists using destination ports


So, we can use network port numbers to identify requests and then combine them with an access rule to control access to resources. Squid provides an ACL type port , which can be used to declare one or more port numbers to construct an ACL. Let's see a simple example:

acl allowed_port port 80

The previous ACL will match any request for port 80 on the destination server requests. The ACL type port can take more than one port or a range of ports as an argument. So, if we want to assign multiple ports, we can list them as follows:

acl allowed_ports port 80 443 1025-65535

The ACL allowed_ports will match all the requests requesting a connection to ports 80, 443, or any within the range of 1025 to 65535.

Normally, the policy is to allow only needed ports and deny connection to all other ports to prevent any type of illegal or unauthorized access. Squid has a lot of pre-defined ports aggregated under the ACLs named SSL_ports and Safe_ports...