Recently we published a brief overview of Squid. And right now we’re following up with a sequel to that introductory article. In the previous part we barely touched the tip of the iceberg, even though Squid’s major functions were clearly explained. Now we are going to actually get it up and running!
Since this a sequel, it should go without saying that this part presumes reading the previous part. Therefore, in order to eliminate redundancy, we won't get deeply into explaining what Squid is and why you should implement it in your network infrastructure; nor will we cover its functions once again. Instead, we'll take up from where we left off and continue our journey with a discussion of practical tasks.
Squid is a cross-platform product. This means it can be deployed on numerous operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Windows and even OS X and Solaris. Throughout this article we will lead you through the process of installing Squid, the transparent caching proxy, on a Linux machine, which we'll call a proxy server machine.
It really does not matter on which Linux distributions you choose to deploy. The configuration tips are similar if you're setting up Squid on a Windows OS, too. Once we install Squid and schedule its processes to automatically start after a possible (but unfortunate) system reboot, we will do some minimal but necessary configuration.
A minimal amount of configuration is required to be able to access Squid from computers spread over a local area network (LAN). Hence, in this article we will assume that you have a LAN with a specific number of computers and you want to set up Squid as a caching transparent proxy through which these client computers will get access to the Internet. This is a wise decision (for security and performance benefits).
Now that we've introduced the scenario, let's roll up our sleeves and get down to work.
