Controlling Web Access with Squid
In This Chapter
Download and Install the Squid Package Starting Squid The/etc/squid/squid.confFile Forcing Users to Use Your Squid Server Squid Disk Usage Troubleshooting Squid Conclusion
Two important goals of many small businesses are to:
The Squid Web caching proxy server can achieve both these goals fairly easily.
Users configure their Web browsers to use the Squid proxy server instead of going to the Web directly. The Squid server then checks its Web cache for the Web information requested by the user. It returns any matching information that it finds in its cache. If it does not find any, it goes to the Web to find it on behalf of the user. Once it locates the information, Squid populates its cache with that information and also forwards it to the user's Web browser.
As you can see, this reduces the amount of data accessed from the Web. Another advantage is that you can configure your firewall to accept HTTP Web traffic from the Squid server only and no one else. Squid can then be configured to request usernames and passwords for each user that uses its services. This provides simple access control to the Internet.
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