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

HTTPS port


Let's consider a scenario where we are serving a website or a few pages on a website over an encrypted secure connection using secure HTTP or HTTPS. We can outsource the encryption and decryption work to the Squid proxy server, which can handle HTTPS requests. So, when we configure Squid to accept HTTPS connections or requests, it'll decrypt the requests and forward the unencrypted requests to the web server.

Note

Please note that we should use the --enable-ssl option with the configure program before compiling, if we want Squid to accept HTTPS requests. Also note that several operating systems don't provide packages capable of HTTPS reverse-proxy due to GPL and policy constraints.

HTTPS options in reverse proxy mode

Let's have a look at the syntax for the https_port directive.

https_port [IP_ADDRESS:]port accel cert=certificate.pem [key=key.pem] [options]

In the preceding configuration line, the IP_ADDRESS to which Squid will bind to can be optionally specified. The option port determines...