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 – constructing ACL lists using domain names


Let's construct an ACL to identify requests for pages on www.example.com.

acl example dstdomain www.example.com

The previous ACL element will be able to identify any request for any web page on the domain www.example.com. So, if we try to browse http://www.example.com/ or http://www.example.com/index.html, the URLs will be identified by the ACL example.

However, the problem with this ACL is that it will not be able to identify requests to example.com or some.example.com and so on. So, if we browse to http://example.com/ or http://video.example.com/, our requests will not be identified by the ACL example.

To overcome this problem, we can prefix the domain name with a period or dot (.). A dot is treated as a wildcard by Squid and an ACL will match that domain or any sub-domain of that particular domain. Let's see an example.

acl example dstdomain .example.com

The previous ACL element will match example.com or any of its sub-domains such...