.:: Linux All Around ::.

This post was made by a friend of mine Piju, so i’m gonna re-port it again since i find it very useful and i hope you’ll find it too. Credit to Piju

This is a short guide how to set up a transparent cache proxy on Ubuntu/Debian Server.

Basically, there are two reasons why you may be interested setting up a Squid proxy: speed up your web access and save your bandwidth. Let assume that you already set up a Linux gateway using iptables. It is possible to run squid also on Windows but unfortunately it is extremely hard to find a hardware on which Windows is able to survive more than one week. Other words, windows is out of scope of this article. The first step is to install squid 3

apt-get install squid3

edit the squid 3 configuration file in your favorite editor

sudo vi /etc/squid3/squid.conf

and set the transparency and the allowed hosts http_port 3128 transparent

acl our_networks src 192.168.1.0/24

http_access allow our_networks where 192.168.1.0/24 is the IP range of local network.

Probably you need adjust the swap size

cache_dir diskd /var/spool/squid3 7000 16 256

where the first number denotes the size of cache in megabytes.

Save you changes and restart the squid proxy by

sudo /etc/init.d/squid3 restart

For more detailed configuration read the manual of Squid or check the configuration examples on Squid wiki page.

Remember, the memory and processor usage of squid is a function of swap size. Last but not the least we need to redirect the HTTP traffic to your new shiny proxy

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.1:3128

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 3128

where eth1,eth0 are the LAN, WAN devices and 192.168.0.1 is the IP address of your LAN device. After all, probably you feel the need to monitor the performance of your proxy. Unfortunately, most of the squid log parsers in the Ubuntu/Debian repository are configured for Squid 2.x. Nevertheless, squid 3 uses the same log format, so you can change the log file path in your parser config file (sarg, calamaris, etd.) or simply link the log directory of squid 3 to the correct path

ln -s /var/log/squid3 /var/log/squid

Good luck!