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 – debugging access control


Normally, it's easy to construct ACLs using various ACL types and they will work as expected. However, as our configuration gets bigger, ACLs may get confusing and it'll be hard to point out the exact culprit ACL causing problems such as, access denied messages or allowing access to a denied object. To debug our ACLs in such a situation, we can take advantage of the debug_options directive so that we can see the step-by-step processing of ACLs by Squid. We'll learn to debug our example configuration.

Consider the following access control lines in our configuration file:

acl example dstdomain .example.com
acl png urlpath_regex -i \.png$

http_access deny png example
http_access allow localhost
http_access allow localnet
http_access deny all

If we consult the table of section numbers for the Squid components, the section number for access control is 28. So, we will add the following line to our configuration file:

debug_options ALL,1 28,3

The previous...