Squid cache

Squid is a popular open source proxy webcache. It has a 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.\nIt is primarily designed to run on Unix-like systems. Caching is a way to store requested Internet objects (i.e., data available via the HTTP, FTP, and gopher protocols) on a system closer to the requesting site. Web browsers 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 ISPs to increase speed to their customers, also known as Web Server Acceleration, and LANs that share an Internet connection. Because it is also a proxy, it provides some anonymity and security. Squid has been in development for many years and is very complete, robust, and open source (GPL). It supports many protocols, although it is primarily used for HTTP and FTP. It 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. Another feature is something called "transparent caching," a way to avoid configuring the client browser, with HTTP requests intercepted by squid. Some support is available for TLS, SSL, and HTTPS. Squid can run on the following operating systems:\n* Linux\n* FreeBSD\n* OpenBSD\n* NetBSD\n* BSDI\n* Macintosh OS X\n* OSF and Digital Unix \n* IRIX\n* SunOS/Solaris\n* NeXTStep \n* SCO Unix \n* AIX\n* HP-UX Recent versions of Squid will also compile and run on Windows NT with the Cygwin / GnuWin32 packages. Wikimedia servers use Squid to cache frequently requested pages and reduce load on the main database and web servers. As of February 2004, the current stable version is 2.5; there is also a 3.0 version available. See also: Proxy | Web Browser

Related

• Squidguard - A flexible plugin for advanced filtering.\n* Squid + PF - Transparent proxying with Squid and PF.\n* DansGuardian - Smart filtering, can be used together with Squid.

External links

\n*http://www.squid-cache.org/ \n\n