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Squid is a Proxy Server and Web Cache Daemon . It has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a Web Server by caching repeated requests, to caching Web , DNS and other Computer Network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, to aiding security by filtering traffic. Although primarily used for HTTP and FTP , Squid includes limited support for several other Protocol s including TLS , SSL , Internet Gopher and HTTPS .1 The development version of Squid (3.0) includes preliminary IPv6 support. Squid has been developed for many years. Early work on the program was completed at the University Of California, San Diego and funded via two grants from the National Science Foundation . Squid is primarily designed to run on Unix-like systems but runs perfectly on Windows -based systems with Cygwin . Released under the GNU General Public License , Squid is Free Software . WEB PROXY Caching is a way to store requested Internet objects (e.g. data like web pages) available via the HTTP, FTP, and Gopher protocols 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 can provide some Anonymity and Security . However, it also can introduce significant privacy concerns as it can log a lot of data including URLs requested, the exact date and time, the name and version of the requesters' web browser and operating system, and the Referer . 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) and often introduces the privacy concerns mentioned above. Squid has some features that can help Anonymize connections, such as disabling or changing specific header fields in a Client 's HTTP requests. Whether these are set, and what they are set to do, is up to the person who controls the computer running Squid. People requesting pages through a network which transparently uses Squid will usually have no idea if this information is being logged.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. As an example, if ''slow.example.com'' is a "real" web server, and ''www.example.com'' is the Squid cache server that "accelerates" it, the first time any page is requested from ''www.example.com'', the cache server would get the actual page from ''slow.example.com'', but later requests would get the stored copy directly from the accelerator (for a configurable period, after which the stored copy would be discarded). 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. This does, however, mean that the source server cannot accurately report on its traffic numbers without additional configuration, as all requests would seem to have come from the reverse proxy. A way to adapt the reporting on the source server is to use the X_HTTP_FORWARDED_FOR HTTP header reported by the reverse proxy, to get the real client's IP address. 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 System s:
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