Squid: The Definitive Guide

Appendix F. Configuring Squid Clients

This appendix contains information on setting up various browsers and user-agents to use Squid. Although it is more extensively covered in my O’Reilly book Web Caching, I’ll include some brief instructions here.

I have instructions for the following HTTP user-agents: Internet Explorer v6, Konqueror v3, Lynx v2.8, Netscape v7 a.k.a. Mozilla v5, Opera v7, libwww-perl v5, Python’s urllib/urllib2, and Wget v1.8. If you think this is all a huge hassle, consider using HTTP interception, as described in Chapter 9.

Manually

Web browsers and other HTTP-based user-agents have methods for explicitly setting a proxy address. For large organizations, this is a real hassle. You may simply have too many desktops to visit one at a time. Additionally, this approach isn’t as flexible as the others. For example, you can’t temporarily stop the flow of requests to the proxy or easily bypass the cache for certain troublesome sites.

Browsers usually give you the option to send HTTPS URLs to a proxy. Squid can handle HTTPS requests, although it can’t cache the responses. Squid simply tunnels the encrypted traffic. Thus, you should configure the browser to proxy HTTPS requests only if your firewall prevents direct connections to secure sites.

Netscape/Mozilla

To manually configure proxies with Netscape and Mozilla, follow this sequence of menus:

• Edit

• Preferences

• Advanced

• Proxies

• Manual proxy configuration

• Fill in the HTTP Proxy address and Port fields. Enter the same values for ...