Squid Proxy

Given my main home machine is now running Fedora 14 rather than windows I have decided to install the squid proxy to have a look at how this can help with caching web pages locally.

The install was very straight foward

yum install squid
vi /etc/squid/squid.conf

I then uncommented the squid_dir line in the file to allow it to write a disk cache and started the proxy with

service squid start

Then configured the browser (firefox) to use the squid proxy on the default port 3128.

Thats it.

To look at the contents of the squid logs I installed calamaris

yum install calamaris

cd /var/log/squid

cat access.log | calamaris -a | more

Further steps I will look at is allowing access from other machines on my home network - likely I will have to adjust the iptables firewall to allow them to connect, but this is something you should take the time to understand if you don't already.   (you can always use the GUI tools to configure these things, but that does not help me long term when administering machines through terminal sessions, so I like to use the command line where possible)