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

Chapter 2. Configuring Squid

We have learned about compiling Squid source code and installing Squid from a source and binary package. In this chapter, we are going to learn to configure Squid according to the requirements of a given network. We will learn about the general syntax used for a Squid configuration file and then we will move on to exploring the different options available to fine tune Squid. There will be a few options which we will only cover briefly but there will be chapters dedicated to them while we will explore other options in detail.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

  • Quick exposure to Squid

  • Syntax of the configuration file

  • HTTP port, the most important configuration directive

  • Access Control Lists (ACLs)

  • Controlling access to various components of Squid

  • Cache peers or neighbors

  • Caching the web documents in the main memory and hard disk

  • Tuning Squid to enhance bandwidth savings and reduce latency

  • Modifying the HTTP headers accompanied with requests and responses

  • Configuring...