by Noah Gift
Why Squid? Why only five minutes?
There are many great tools that Squid has to offer, but when I need to redirect http traffic to a caching server for performance increases or security, squid’s my pick. Squid has built in proxy and caching tools that are simple, yet effective.
I recently used Squid for a secure subnet that did not allow outgoing port 80 http access to external IP addresses. Many organizations will block external port 80 access at the router level. This is a great way to eliminate a huge security hole, but a headache when a systems administrator needs to reach the outside world temporarily to download a file. Another scenario: redirect all computers in a home network to a local caching server to increase website query performance and save on bandwidth.
The situations described above are when the five minute Squid configuration comes in very handy. All requests for external http access can be handled by squid through a simple proxy configuration on each client machine. Sounds complicated? It isn’t. Let’s get into the details next.
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