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

Logging


Squid logs all the client requests and events to files. Squid provides various directives to control the location of log files, format of log messages, and to choose which requests to log. Let's have a brief look at some of the directives. We'll learn about logging in detail in Chapter 5, Understanding Log Files and Log Formats.

Log formats

We can define multiple log formats using the directive logformat as well as the pre-defined log formats supplied by Squid. Log formats are basically an arrangement of one or more pre-defined format codes. Various log formats such as squid, common, combined, and so on, are provided by Squid, by default. We'll have a detailed look at defining additional log formats in Chapter 5.

Log file rotation or log file backups

Over a period of time, the log files grow in size. The common practice is to move the older logs to separate files as a backup or for analysis, and then continue writing the logs to the original log file. The default Squid behavior is to...