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 – exploring Basic authentication


HTTP Basic authentication supports the following auth_param options:

auth_param basic program COMMAND
auth_param basic utf8 on|off
auth_param basic children NUMBER [startup=N] [idle=N] [concurrency=N]
auth_param basic realm STRING
auth_param basic credentialsttl TIME_TO_LIVE
auth_param basic casesensitive on|off

Now let's discuss what each parameter specifies and what possible values can be passed with it.

Note

Please note that the options startup, idle, and concurrency are available only in Squid version 3.2 or later.

The program parameter specifies the absolute path to the authentication helper we are trying to configure. We should note that, we can also specify additional arguments to the program on the same line. By default, all the authentication helpers reside in ${prefix}/libexec/ where ${prefix} is the value supplied to the --prefix option while running the configure program.

The aforementioned code is given the username password string...