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

Other configuration directives


Squid has hundreds of configuration directives to control it in various ways. It's not possible to discuss all of them here, we'll try to cover the important ones.

Setting the effective user for running Squid

Although we generally start the Squid server as root, it never runs with the privileges of the root user. Right after starting, Squid changes its real UID (User ID)/GID (Group ID) to the user determined by the directive cache_effective_user. By default, it is set to nobody. We can create a separate user for running Squid and set the value of this directive accordingly. For example, on some operating systems, Squid is run as squid user. The corresponding configuration line will be as follows:

cache_effective_user squid

Please make sure that the user specified as the value for cache_effective_user exists.

Configuring hostnames for the proxy server

Squid uses hostnames for the server for forwarding requests to other cache peers or for detecting the neighbor caches...