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

Diverting HTTP traffic to Squid


We learned in previous sections that we need to divert all HTTP traffic from our clients to our proxy server. Later, we'll have a look at the ways in which we can divert HTTP traffic to our Squid proxy server.

Using a router's policy routing to divert requests

If we have an arrangement where all our client requests are passing through a router, we can utilize the router's ability to divert the packets, to redirect them to our Squid proxy server. Therefore if we set our router's policy to redirect all the packets with port 80 to the Squid server and all other traffic is sent to the internet directly, it will look like the following diagram:

In the previous diagram, we can see that the router is passing all the HTTP requests to the Squid proxy server and all the non-HTTP traffic is going to the internet directly. A router can only modify the IP address of a packet. So, we must configure an IP packet filtering tool (iptables, ipfw) to redirect traffic on port 80...