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 – running the configure command


Now that we have had a brief look at several of the available options, we can layout the options for the environment for which we are building Squid. Now, we are ready to run the configure command with the following options:

./configure --prefix=/opt/squid/ --with-logdir=/var/log/squid/ --with-pidfile=/var/run/squid.pid --enable-storeio=ufs,aufs --enable-removal-policies=lru,heap --enable-icmp --enable-useragent-log --enable-referer-log --enable-cache-digests --with-large-files

The preceding command will run for a while, probing the system for various capabilities and making decisions on the basis of the available libraries and modules. The configure writes debugging output to the config.log file in the same directory. It is always wise to check the config.log for any errors which may have occurred while running the configure command.

If everything goes fine, configure will generate the makefiles in several directories which will be required for compiling the source code in the next step.

What just happened?

Running the configure program with the options mentioned in the previous code example, will generate the makefiles needed to compile the Squid source code and source code of the modules enabled. It will also generate the config.log and config.status files. All the messages which are generated during the running of the configure program are logged to the config.log file. The config.status file is an executable which can be run to recreate the makefiles.

Have a go hero – debugging configure errors

In the Squid source directory, run the configure command, as shown in the following code:

./configure --enable-storeio='aufs,disk'

Now try to check what went wrong and fix the errors.