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 – installing Apache Web server


To install Apache on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, or Fedora, we can use yum, the default package manager for these distributions, for example:

$ yum install httpd

To install Apache Ubuntu or Debian, we can use the aptitude package manager, as shown in the following example:

$ aptitude install apache2

For installing Apache on other operating systems, please check the package installation manual of the operating system.

What just happened?

We learned to install the very popular open source Web server, Apache, using the package manager for our operating system. This will help us in getting the web interface for the cache manager up and running.

Configuring Apache for providing the cache manager web interface

After installing Apache, we need to configure it to use cachemgr.cgi. The file cachemgr.cgi is generally located at ${prefix}/libexec/cachemgr.cgi where ${prefix} is the value specified for the --prefix option, before running configure.

Note...