Squid: The Definitive Guide
By Duane Wessels
January 2004, O'Reilly and Associates
ISBN 0-596-00162-2
442 pages, $44.95 US
Squid is the most popular Web caching software in use today, and
it works on a variety of platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, and
Microsoft Windows. Squid improves network performance by reducing
the amount of bandwidth used when surfing the Web. It makes web
pages load faster, and can even be used to reduce the load on your
web server. By caching and reusing popular web content, Squid allows
you to get by with smaller network connections. It also protects
the hosts on your internal network by acting as a firewall and
proxying your internal web traffic. You can use Squid to collect
statistics about the traffic on your network, prevent users from
visiting inappropriate web sites at work or school, ensure that
only authorized users can surf the Internet, and enhance your privacy
by filtering sensitive information from web requests. Companies,
schools, libraries, and organizations that use Web caching proxies
can look forward to a multitude of benefits.
Written by Duane Wessels, the creator of Squid, Squid: The
Definitive Guide will help you to configure and tune Squid for your
particular situation. Newcomers to Squid learn how to download,
compile, and install code, while seasoned users of Squid will be
interested in the later chapters, which tackle advanced topics such
as high-performance storage options, rewriting requests, HTTP server
acceleration, monitoring, debugging, and troubleshooting Squid.
Topics covered in this book include:
- Compiling and installing Squid
- Running Squid
- Using Squid's sophisticated access controls
- Tuning disk storage for optimal performance
- Configuring your operating system for HTTP interception
- Forwarding requests to other web caches
- Using redirectors to rewrite user requests
- Monitoring Squid with the cache manager and SNMP
- Using Squid to accelerate and protect HTTP servers
- Managing bandwidth consumption with Delay Pools