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 – testing a complex access control


An access control involving IP addresses from different subnets is a bit difficult to test but can be tested using the squidclient. This can be done by creating virtual or alias network interfaces on the machine. For example, the IP address of our proxy server is 192.168.36.204 and we have the following access control configuration in our squid.conf, which we want to test:

acl bad_guys src 10.1.33.9 10.1.33.182
http_access deny bad_guys

We can't test these rules directly as our IP address is different from the clients we have blocked and Squid will check for the source IP address in the requests. However, we can use option -l, which is available with the squidclient, which will bind it to a different IP address while sending requests to the Squid proxy server. To achieve this, we need to create an alias network interface on our server. In most Linux/Unix-based systems, this can be achieved by using the following command:

ifconfig eth0:0 10...