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

DNS server configuration


For every request received from a client, Squid needs to resolve the domain name before it can contact the target web server. For this purpose, Squid can either use the built-in internal DNS client or, external DNS program to resolve the hostnames.

The default behavior is to use the internal DNS client for resolving hostnames unless we have used the --disable-internal-dns option but it must be set with the configure program before compiling Squid, as shown:

$ ./configure --disable-internal-dns

Let's have a quick look at the DNS-related configuration directives provided by Squid.

Specifying the DNS program path

The directive cache_dns_program is used to specify the path of the external DNS program built with Squid. If we have not moved the Squid-related file after installing, this directive will have the correct value, by default. However, if the DNS program is located at a different location, we can specify the path using the following directive:

cache_dns_program...