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

Cache manager


As described briefly in the earlier chapters, cache manager (cachemgr) is a web interface for managing the Squid proxy servers. It is provided by default. This means that we don't have to install any additional module, or software, other than a web server to have a web interface to manage our proxy server. Also, cache manager is not just an interface to manage our proxy server. It provides various statistics about the usage of different resources that can help us in monitoring the proxy server from a web interface.

But before we can use the cache manager web interface, we need to configure Squid and our web server to use the cachmgr.cgi program for providing the web interface.

Installing the Apache Web server

Although this topic is out of the scope of this book, we'll have a quick look at installing Apache, which is a very popular open source Web server and is available for free from http://httpd.apache.org/. Apache is available in software repositories of most Linux/Unix-based...