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 – customizing the access log with a new log format


Squid has a lot of information about every client request and reply, however it writes only the requested information to the log file, which we can customize by defining several log formats.

Now, let's define a log format in which the time will appear in a human-readable format and use it with access_log:

logformat minimal %tl %>a %Ss/%03>Hs %rm %ru
access_log daemon:/opt/squid/var/logs/access.log minimal

So, we have constructed a new log format that will log the information we are most interested in. Let's see a few log messages in the preceding format:

11/Sep/2010:23:52:33 +0530 127.0.0.1 TCP_MISS/200 GET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

11/Sep/2010:23:52:34 +0530 127.0.0.1 TCP_MISS/200 GET http://en.wikipedia.org/images/wikimedia-button.png

Now the time in the log messages is human-readable and we can therefore tell when a particular URL was accessed.

We should note that if we are using custom formats for access...