Practical Linux Security Cookbook

Using Squid proxy

Squid is a web proxy application with a variety of configurations and uses. Squid has a large number of access controls, and supports different protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSL, and so on.

In this section we will see how to use Squid as an HTTP proxy.

Getting Ready

To install and use Squid on a particular system on a network, ensure that the particular system has enough physical memory, because Squid also works as a cache proxy server and thus needs space to maintain the cache.

We are using a Ubuntu system for our example and Squid is available in Ubuntu repositories, so we need to ensure that our system is up to date. For doing this we run the following command:

apt-get update

After that, run the following command:

apt-get ...