Squid: The Definitive Guide

O'Reilly
ISBN:0596001622
(or in wlug's library for WLUG members)

I've been living out in the rural areas around Hamilton for about 6 years now, and not having broadband with 6 machines on the network all trying to access the Internet through a dialup connection has always been a nightmare. Due to the fact most of these machines access only a limited set of web pages, I resorted to a Squid cache to speed up the loading of the web pages. Now having access to this excellent book and being able to use the information in the advanced chapters I've been able to fine tune my cache to increase it's performance with respect to the dialup connection.

This book is sectioned into 16 chapters. These chapters can be divided up into three sections, Basic Setup, Advanced Configuration, Tuning and Troubleshooting. The Basic Setup covers chapters 1 - 5 which covers an introduction to the Squid project and some background history, getting Squid, compiling and installing Squid, writing a basic configuration, and running Squid. The Advanced configuration section (Chapters 6 - 12) covers an in depth description of access controls and how they work, disk cache settings, cache peering, creting and configuring redirectors, and setting up authentication. The Tuning and Troubleshooting section covers what the log files look like, monitoring the cache, fine tuning and benchmarking the cache, and troubleshooting common errors. And finally the appendix contains an apparently complete quick reference to the squid.conf configuration file.

I've found this book to be an excellent source on extra detail with respect to setting up ACL's, fine tuning disk performance and what guideline to use for how big the cache should be, and whether to setup the cache on a RAID or on individual disks. The rough guideline recommended for the size of a disk cache is basically, enough to cover 3 to 7 days worth of bandwidth although YMMV.

-- GerwinVanDeSteeg

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