Summary

We learned about proxy servers and web caching in general and the ways in which they can be useful, especially for saving bandwidth and improving end user experience. Then we moved on to exploring Squid, which is a powerful caching proxy server. The following are the important things that we learned in this chapter:

• Various ways to grab Squid for production use or development

• Meaning of various configure options

• Compiling Squid source code

• Installing Squid from source and binary package

• Pros and cons of compiling Squid from source

We also discussed about the directory structure and files generated by Squid during installation.

Now that we know how to install Squid, we are ready to learn how to configure Squid according to requirements for a given network environment. We'll learn about this with a few examples in the next chapter.