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 – adding backend web servers


We learned about cache_peer in detail in the previous chapter and previously, we saw two options specifically meant for Squid in reverse proxy mode. Now, let's see a few examples showing the usage of the cache_peer directive to add backend web servers.

cache_peer 127.0.0.1 parent 80 0 no-query no-digest originserver
cache_peer local_ip_of_web_server parent 80 no-query originserver forcedomain=www.example.com

What just happened?

We learned to add backend web servers in our Squid configuration file as cache peers or neighbors so that Squid can forward them the requests which it receives from clients.

Support for surrogate protocol

The requests and responses for a web document may pass through a series of server surrogates (reverse proxies or origin server accelerators) and forward caching proxies. While the server surrogates are used for scaling individual or a group of websites, the forward proxies are used to provide a better browsing experience...