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 – combining ACLs and HTTP access


Let's have a look at a few cases for controlling HTTP access using example ACLs. When we have multiple access rules, Squid matches a particular request against them from top to bottom and keeps doing so until a definite action (allow or deny) is determined. Please note that if we have multiple ACLs within a single access rule, then a request is matched against all the ACLs from left to right, and Squid stops processing the rule as soon as it encounters an ACL that can't identify the request. An access rule with multiple ACLs results in a definite action, only if the request is identified by all the ACLs used in the rule.

acl my_home_machine src 192.0.2.21
acl my_lab_machine src 198.51.100.86
http_access allow my_home_machine
http_access allow my_lab_machine

The ACLs and access rules in the previous code will allow hosts 192.0.2.21 and 198.51.100.86 to access the proxy server. The aforementioned access rules may also be written as:

acl my_machines...