Squid is a well-known application in the forward proxy world and works well as a caching proxy. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and other popular network protocols.
Following are the steps to setup and configure Squid proxy:
Step 1 : First, update the apt cache and then install squid as follows
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install squid
Step 2 : Edit the /etc/squid/squid.conf file
sudo nano /etc/squid/squid.confEnsure that the cache_dir directive is not commented out
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 100 16 256
Optionally, change the http_port directive to your desired TCP port
http_port 8080
Step 3 : Save changes with Ctrl + O and exit with Ctrl + X.
Step 4 : Restart the squid server
sudo service squid restart
Step 5 : Next, configure your browser using the squid server as the http/https proxy
Squid Analysis Report Generator
SARG is an open source tool to monitor the squid server usages. It parses the logs generated by Squid and converts them to easy-to-digest HTML-based reports. You can track various metrics such as bandwidth used per user, top sites, downloads, and so on.
Step 1 : Sarg can be quickly installed with the following command:
sudo apt-get install sarg
Step 2 : The configuration file for Sarg is located at /etc/sarg/sarg.conf
cat /etc/sarg/sarg.conf
Squid guard
Step 1 : Squid guard is another useful plugin for squid server. It is generally used to block a list of websites so that these sites are inaccessible from the internal network. As always, it can also be installed with a single command, as follows:
sudo apt-get install squidguard
Step 2 : The configuration file is located at /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf
cat /etc/squid/squidGuard.conf