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

Time for action – setting the HTTP port


Now, we'll see the various ways to set the HTTP port in the squid.conf file:

  • In its simplest form, we just specify the port on which we want Squid to listen:

    http_port 8080
  • We can also specify the IP address and port combination on which we want Squid to listen. We normally use this approach when we have multiple interfaces on our machine and we want Squid to listen only on the interface connected to local area network (LAN):

    http_port 192.0.2.25:3128

    This will instruct Squid to listen on port 3128 on the interface with the IP address as 192.0.2.25.

  • Another form in which we can specify http_port is by using hostname and port combination:

    http_port myproxy.example.com:8080

    The hostname will be translated to an IP address by Squid and then Squid will listen on port 8080 on that particular IP address.

  • Another aspect of this directive is that, it can take multiple values on separate lines. Let's see what the following lines will do:

    http_port 192.0.2.25:8080
    http_port...