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 – constructing simple ACLs


Let's construct an access control list for the domain name example.com:

acl example_site dstdomain example.com

In this code, example_site is the name of the ACL with type dstdomain, which reflects that the value, example.com, is the domain name.

Now if we want to construct an access control list which can cover a lot of example websites, we have the following three possible ways of doing it:

  1. Values on a single line: We can specify all the possible values on a single line:

    acl example_sites dstdomain example.com example.net example.org

    This works fine as long as there are only a few values.

  2. Values on multiple lines: In case the list of values that we want to specify grows significantly, we can split the list and pass values on multiple lines:

    acl example_sites dstdomain example.com example.net
    acl example_sites dstdomain example.org
  3. Values from a file: If case the number of values we want to specify is quite large, we can put them in a dedicated file and...