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 – writing rules for special access


Let's say john, michelle, and sarah are the usernames allotted to our administrators and 192.0.2.46, 192.0.2.9, and 192.0.2.182 are their respective IP addresses allotted to their laptops. In this case, we are allowing additional access when the requests are originating from the above IP addresses or if the requests are authenticated with the credentials of the aforementioned users. The required ACL lists should look similar to the following:

acl admin_laptops src 192.0.2.46 192.0.2.9 192.0.2.182
acl authenticated proxy_auth REQUIRED
acl admin_user proxy_auth john michelle sarah
acl work_related_websites dstdomain "/opt/squid/etc/work_websites"

Now, we need to allow everyone to access only work related websites, except administrators who should be able to access everything. Therefore, we should build the following access rules:

http_access allow admin_laptops
http_access allow admin_user
http_access allow localnet work_related_websites authenticated...