HTTP Proxy Server for Linux

Squid is the popular choice for an HTTP proxy server for Linux. On PCQLinux 7.1 installing Squid is a matter of installing the RPM named squid-2.3.STABLE4-10.i386.rpm as:

rpm —ivh squid-2.3.STABLE4-10.i386.rpm

found in RedHat/RPMS directory on PCQLinux CD1 (July 2001 issue). By default Squid accepts HTTP requests on port 3128. If you want to change this (to say 8000), open the file squid.conf found in /etc/squid directory and add the line:

http_port 8000

Find the line: http_access deny all in this file and change it to:

http_access allow all

This line allows everyone on your network to use the proxy server. Now, run the proxy server as:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/squid start

To use the proxy server, users on your network need to fill in the IP address of the Linux machine running Squid and the port number you specified with ‘http_port’ in the proxy configuration of their browser. For more in-depth information refer to the article Squid for Linux on page 128 in PCQuest’s October 2000 issue. You can also find this article at

www.pcquest.com in the archive section.