LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Squid: History and Overview

Squid is a caching proxy server. It normally sits "between" a web surfer and a web server. The surfer requests a web page from the proxy server. The proxy server either makes the request for the surfer to the web server (a proxy request) or serves the client the page directly if it's already saved in the proxy server's disk cache. Because the proxy server is between the client and the server, a number of options are available, including logging, filtering, and other access control. Squid can do all of these things and more.

Squid was originally based on the Harvest project, which is an ARPA-funded set of tools for building a standards-compliant web crawler. Squid is currently maintained by open source programmers around the world and is licensed under the GNU General Public License. For more information on Harvest, visit http://webharvest.sourceforge.net/ng, and for more information on Squid, visit the Squid home page at http://www.squid-cache.org.

You can choose to install Squid from either source or a binary included with your distribution. As of this writing, the latest recommended version of Squid is 2.5STABLE12. Unlike Apache, Squid does not have nearly as many compile-time options that you might be interested in. A binary Squid package from your Linux distribution usually works fine. If, however, you are interested in discovering exactly what compile-time options are available to you, you can read about them in the Squid documentation at http://squid-docs.sourceforge.net/latest/html/x220.html ...