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

Testing access control with squidclient


We learned in Chapter 3 that we should always test our configuration file for errors or warnings before deploying it on the production servers. Squid provides the command-line option -k parse using which the configuration file can be parsed quickly.

However, successful parsing of the configuration file doesn't guarantee that Squid will be able to allow or deny the requests or replies in the manner we are expecting. As the configuration files grows in size, the number ACL lists and corresponding rules keeps on increasing, which may sometimes lead to confusion. To test the access control in our new configuration file, we can use the squidclient program.

For this purpose, we'll either need a different test server or we'll need to compile Squid on the production server with a different --prefix option with the configure program. For example, we can compile Squid using the following commands:

configure --prefix=/opt/squidtest/
make
make install

The previous...