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 – configuring Squid to use SASL authentication


To configure the SASL authenticator, we need to create a file named basic_sasl_auth.conf with the following content:

pwcheck_method:sasldb
  1. Move this file to the /usr/lib/sasl2/ directory.

  2. Once we have placed the configuration file in the appropriate directory, we can add the following line in our configuration file to ensure the use of SASL authentication:

    auth_param basic program /opt/squid/libexec/basic_sasl_auth

This command will configure Squid to use the basic_sasl_auth program as an SASL authentication helper.

Note

The basic_sasl_auth requires the Cyrus SASL library (http://asg.web.cmu.edu/sasl/).

What just happened?

We learned to configure the SASL authenticator and then configure Squid to use SASL authentication.

getpwnam authentication

The getpwnam authentication helper can allow Squid to authenticate local users. This authentication helper uses the getpwnam() Unix utility to locate users who have login accounts on the Squid...