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 – blocking video content


So, for blocking the video content, first we'll need to identify all the requests for video content. For this purpose, we can simply use the ACL type url_regex as follows:

acl video_content urlpath_regex -i \.(mpg|mpeg|avi|mov|flv|wmv|mkv|rmvb)(\?.*)?$

The previous ACL list will match all the URLs ending with extensions of common video formats.

As a video can be served using dynamic URLs, the URL returning video content may not look like a URL to a video file at all. For achieving better control, we also need to use the ACL type rep_mime_type to detect the content type of the replies returned by webservers. So, we can construct another ACL list as follows:

acl video_in_reply rep_mime_type -i ^video\/

The previous ACL list will match all the replies with video as a part of their content type. So, now we need to deny access to these ACL lists, which we can do by using the following rules:

http_access deny video_content
http_reply_access deny video_in_reply...