Squid Open Source Web Caching for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Using This Program for Storing Web Pages"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

Squid is the most popular open source web caching software for Unix platforms. Created by Duane Wessels in 1998, Squid is a high performance program.

Squid is derived from the Harvest project, funded by ARPA, which started the Internet many years ago

Web caching is done by proxy servers for web clients. It's basically a form of storing web sites so they are more easily accessible and to reduce the work of major servers. Squid handles all requests in a process that is non-blocking and I/O (Input/Output)-driven.

For example, Google caches most of the web sites in its index. When you make a search and then click on a link, chances are the web site you're taken to is on one of Google's many servers - NOT the original web site.

(Some web sites which change often do not like this, since it means that what you see from Google may not be the most current version of their site.)

Also, if you surf the web on the job at a big company, chances are you are routed through a proxy server which screens and stores (using a web cache program) all the web sites that you visit and download.

This gives them a chance to stop you visiting your favorite porn and gambling sites on their time.

Squid is known to work well with the following operating systems:

Linux
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
BSDI
Mac OS/X
OSF/Digital Unix/Tru64
IRIX
SunOS/Solaris
NeXTStep
SCO Unix
AIX
HP-UX
OS/2

The latest release of Squid is 2.5 Stable7, released October 11, 2004.

Like all open source software, Squid is available for free and is the end result of the ongoing labor of many volunteers.

Why is it named Squid? "All the good ones were taken."

Squid supports the following technologies:

proxying and caching of HTTP, FTP, and other URLs
Gopher
proxying for SSL
cache hierarchies
ICP, HTCP, CARP, Cache Digests
transparent caching
WCCP (Squid v2.3 and above)
extensive access controls
HTTP server acceleration
SNMP
caching of DNS lookups

Squid uses the Internet Cache Protocol. It also reduces the amount of time spent waiting for DNS / Domain Name server lookups.
Squid improves network performance by reducing web surfing bandwidth.

Next: XMI XML Metadata Exchange

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