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

HTTP port


As we learned that Squid will be accepting HTTP requests on behalf of the web servers sitting behind it, the most important configuration directive is http_port. We need to set the HTTP port with the appropriate options. Let's have a look at the general format of http_port for configuring Squid in the reverse proxy mode.

http_port 80 accel [options]

So, we need to specify a port number, such as 80. Apart from the port, we need to use the option accel, which will tell Squid that port 80 will be used for server acceleration. Also, there are additional options that are required to properly configure Squid so that it can communicate with the web servers.

Note

Please note that while configuring Squid in surrogate mode, we need to specify at least one option from defaultsite, vhost, or vport. We should also note that the CONNECT requests are blocked from receiving accel flagged ports.

HTTP options in reverse proxy mode

Let's have a look at the other options that can be used with the http_port...