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

Automatically starting Squid at system startup


Once we have a properly configured and running proxy server, we would like it to start whenever the system is started or rebooted. Next, we'll have a brief look at the most common ways of adding or modifying the boot scripts for popular operating systems. These methods will most probably work on your operating system. If they don't, please refer to the corresponding operating system manual for information on boot scripts.

Adding Squid command to /etc/rc.local file

Adding the full path of the Squid executable file is the easiest way to start Squid on system startup. The file /etc/rc.local is executed after the system boots as the super or root user. We can place the Squid command in this file and it will run every time the system boots up. Add the following line at the end of the /etc/rc.local file:

${prefix}/sbin/squid

Please replace ${prefix} with the installation prefix which you used before compiling Squid.

Adding init script

Alternatively,...