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 – joining a cache hierarchy


Let's add two proxy servers to our Squid configuration file:

cache_peer parent.example.com parent 3128 3130 default
cache_peer sib.example.com sibling 3128 3130 proxy-only

So, according to this configuration, parent.example.com is a parent proxy server and sib.example.com is a sibling proxy server.

What just happened?

We just learned how to add a proxy server or neighbors to our Squid configuration file, so that our proxy server can be a part of a cache hierarchy.

Now, let's have a look at the options which can be used to control ICP or HTCP communication.

ICP options

When we configure a peer with ICP communication, we must configure the icp_port and icp_access directives properly. Next, we'll have a look at the ICP-related options for the cache_peer directive.

no-query

If we use the option no-query, then Squid will never send any ICP queries to this peer.

multicast-responder

The option multicast-responder specifies that this peer is a member of a multicast...