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 – testing our access control example with squidclient


We now need to run the squidclient to fetch http://malware.example.com/ to check if we get an access denied error or not. If we are running the squidclient on the production server, then we don't need to use the -h option to specify the hostname. In this scenario, we can run the squidclient with the -p option to specify the port.

./squidclient -p 8080 http://malware.example.com

However, if we are running the squidclient on a different machine, we will have to use the -h option to specify the hostname of the proxy server. In this scenario, we can run the squidclient with the following configuration:

./squidclient -h proxy.example.com -p 8080 http://malware.example.com

If our access control rules are working and they are rightly placed in the configuration file, we should get an output similar to the following:

HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden
Server: squid/3.1.4
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:28:38 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length...