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 messages in web server log format


When we use Squid in reverse proxy mode, most of our web server log messages will go missing as the requests which can be satisfied from Squid's cache will never make it to the web server. So, Squid's access log will be our source of web server logs now. However, the problem is that, by default Squid's access log format is completely different to the log format used by most web servers. To get rid of this problem, we can use the common log format with the access_log directive and this will allow Squid to start logging messages in the Apache web server log format.

Ignoring the browser reloads

Most browsers have a reload button, which if used, sets the Cache-Control HTTP header to no-cache. This will force Squid to purge the cached content and fetch it from the origin server even if the content in the cache was still valid, which results in a waste of resources.