Starting Squid - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 11 - ADMINISTRATION Administration Manual

It is very important to have sufficient memory for the Squid process, because system
performance is dramatically reduced if it must be swapped to disk. The cachemgr.cgi
tool can be used for the cache memory management. This tool is introduced in Sec-
tion 29.6, "cachemgr.cgi" (page 434). Sites with huge network traffic should consider
using an AMD64 or Intel 64 system with more than 4 GB of memory.
29.2.4 CPU
Squid is not a program that requires intensive CPU usage. The load of the processor is
only increased while the contents of the cache are loaded or checked. Using a multipro-
cessor machine does not increase the performance of the system. To increase efficiency,
it is better to buy faster disks or add more memory.

29.3 Starting Squid

Squid is already preconfigured in SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, you can start it right
after the installation. To ensure a smooth start-up, the network should be configured in
a way that at least one name server and the Internet can be reached. Problems can arise
if a dial-up connection is used with a dynamic DNS configuration. In this case, at least
the name server should be entered, because Squid does not start if it does not detect a
DNS server in /etc/resolv.conf.
29.3.1 Commands for Starting and Stopping
Squid
To start Squid, enter rcsquid start at the command line as root. In the initial
start-up, the directory structure of the cache must first be defined in /var/cache/
squid. This is done automatically by the start script /etc/init.d/squid and
can take a few seconds or even minutes. If done appears to the right in green, Squid
has been successfully loaded. To test the functionality of Squid on the local system,
enter localhost as the proxy and 3128 as the port in the browser.
To allow users from the local system and other systems to access Squid and the Internet,
change the entry in the configuration files /etc/squid/squid.conf from
http_access deny all to http_access allow all. However, in doing
The Proxy Server Squid 423