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Squid a popular Free Software Proxy Server and Web Caching daemon, released under the GNU General Public License . It has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a Web Server by caching repeated requests, to caching Web , DNS and other Network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, to aiding security by filtering traffic. It is primarily designed to run on Unix-like systems. Squid has been developed for many years and is considered very complete and robust. It supports many Protocols , although it is primarily used for HTTP and FTP . Some support is available for TLS , SSL , Internet Gopher and HTTPS {Link without Title} . WEB PROXY Caching is a way to store requested Internet objects (e.g. data like web pages) available via the HTTP, FTP, and Gopher Protocol s on a system closer to the requesting site. Web Browser s can then use the local Squid cache as a Proxy HTTP server, reducing access time as well as Bandwidth consumption. This is often useful for Internet Service Provider s to increase speed to their customers, and LAN s that share an Internet connection. Because it is also a proxy (i.e. it behaves like a client on behalf of the real client), it provides some Anonymity and Security . A client program (e.g. browser) either has to explicitly specify the proxy server it wants to use (typical for ISP customers), or it could be using a proxy without any extra configuration: "transparent caching", in which case all outgoing HTTP requests are intercepted by Squid and all responses are cached. The latter is typically a corporate set-up (all clients are on the same LAN). Squid has some features that can further help Anonymize connections, such as disabling or changing specific header fields in a Client 's HTTP requests. See the documentation for header_access and header_replace for further details. REVERSE PROXY The above set-up—caching the contents of an unlimited number of Webserver s for a limited number of clients—is the classical one. Another set-up is " Reverse Proxy " or "webserver acceleration" (using httpd_accel_host). In this set-up, the cache serves an unlimited number of clients for a limited number of—or just one—web servers. Suppose ''slow.example.com'' is a "real" web server, and ''www.example.com'' is a Squid Cache server that "accelerates" it. The first time any page was requested from ''www.example.com'', the cache server would get the actual page from ''slow.example.com'', but for the next hour/day/year (matter of cache configuration) every next request would get this stored copy directly from the accelerator. The end result, without any action by the clients, is less traffic to the source server, meaning less CPU and memory usage, and less need for bandwidth. It is possible for a single Squid server to serve both as a normal and a reverse proxy simultaneously. COMPATIBILITY Squid can run on the following Operating Systems :
Recent versions of Squid will also compile and run on Windows NT with the Cygwin / GnuWin32 packages. As Of October 2005 , the current stable version is 2.5; there is also a 3.0 version in development. EXTERNAL LINKS Information
Add-ons
Check cache behaviour
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