How to Install Squid 3.5 on Windows – Web Safety
Note
We now have a new project – Web Filtering Proxy for Microsoft Windows. It combines best features of Web Safety but runs natively on Windows. No need to use Hyper-V or dive into Linux specifics. You can enable proxy authentication, HTTPS decryption and filtering with several mouse clicks from Microsoft Management Console. See
This post explains how to easily install Squid Server v. 3. 5. x on Microsoft Windows. We will use an MSI provided by Diladele B. V. that can be downloaded at the following link. This MSI is the result of the work that Diladele team is doing for promoting Squid in Windows community and is based on the Cygwin Squid server component. The installer is an open source project hosted on GitHub, so if you are willing to contribute or have any problems using it please contact support(at)
The actual installation process is very easy and consists of the following steps.
Download the MSI from. Currently only 64 bit version is provided.
After downloading, double click You have to be an administrator to be able to install Squid on your computer.
After that simply, click “Next” button till the installation is finished. You can specify a custom installation directory at the corresponding step (this is not recommended though).
When you click “Finish” the installation process is finished. You should see a squid application appearing in the tray. This application allows you to start/stop the squid service as well as change the squid configuration.
During installation the MSI installer opened TCP port 3128 required to connect to your Squid instance from another machines in your network. If for some reasons this does not work or works not as expected please follow these steps to open required TCP ports.
Type “Windows Firewall with Advanced Security” in the Start Search string on Windows 7 or 8 and press Enter. Click “Inbound Rules” and then “New Rule”.
Create an inbound rule to allow clients connect to the 3128 TCP port, the default port where squid is running.
The server side configuration is over. Now let’s configure the client side. For that you have to specify the proxy in your browser, for example, for the Internet Explorer, go to Tools (Alt + X) / Internet Options and specify the IP address of the computer where Squid is running. For example in our test lab the IP address is 192. 168. 0. 16 (you can identify this address by running the ipconfig /all command on the computer where Squid is installed).
Press Ok to close the LAN settings and then Internet Options. Now your browser is using Squid as a proxy. In the next post we will see how to set up Squid for web filtering HTTP and HTTPS / SSL connections on Windows in an easy way.
Default does not work out-of-the-box in the default VMs provisioned in Rackspace and Amazon EC2 environments due to the Windows Firewall. Please, manually add a new rule to the Windows Firewall to allow incoming connections on port 3128 with a proper subnet mask (i. e. 10. 0/8)
Squid installation on Windows and HTTP proxy cache – ESET …
Squid is an alternative to Apache HTTP Proxy. To install Squid on Windows, follow these steps:
wnload Squid MSI installer and install Squid for Windows icon in the tray menu and select Stop Squid vigate to the Squid installation folder, for example C:\Squid\bin and run the following command from command -z -F
This creates the swap directories for cache.
the Squid for Windows icon in the system tray menu and select Open Squid place _access deny all with _access allow disk caching by adding this line:cache_dir aufs /cygdrive/c/Squid/var/cache 3000 16 256
NOTE
•You can change the location of the cache directory based on your preferences. In the example, the cache directory is located in C:\Squid\var\cache (note the path format in the command). •You can change the total cache size (3000 MB in the example) and the number of first-level sub-directories (16 in the example) and second-level sub-directories (256 in the example) in the cache directory.
and close Squid configuration file the Squid for Windows icon in the tray menu and select Start Squid can verify that the Squid service is running in the snap-in (look for Squid for Windows).
Squid (software) – Wikipedia
SquidDeveloper(s)Duane Wessels, Henrik Nordström, Amos Jeffries, Alex Rousskov, Francesco Chemolli, Robert Collins, Guido Serassio and volunteers[1]Initial releaseJuly 1996Stable release4. 15[2]
/ 10 May 2021; 4 months agoRepository inC++Operating systemBSD, Linux, Unix, Windows[3]TypeProxy serverLicenseGNU GPLv2[4]Website
Squid is a caching and forwarding HTTP web proxy. It has a wide variety of uses, including speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, and aiding security by filtering traffic. Although primarily used for HTTP and FTP, Squid includes limited support for several other protocols including Internet Gopher, SSL, [6] TLS and HTTPS. Squid does not support the SOCKS protocol, unlike Privoxy, with which Squid can be used in order to provide SOCKS support.
Squid was originally designed to run as a daemon on Unix-like systems. A Windows port was maintained up to version 2. 7. New versions available on Windows use the Cygwin environment. [7] Squid is free software released under the GNU General Public License.
History[edit]
Squid was originally developed as the Harvest object cache, [8] part of the Harvest project at the University of Colorado Boulder. [9][10] Further work on the program was completed at the University of California, San Diego and funded via two grants from the National Science Foundation. [11] Duane Wessels forked the “last pre-commercial version of Harvest” and renamed it to Squid to avoid confusion with the commercial fork called Cached 2. 0, which became NetCache. [12][13] Squid version 1. 0. 0 was released in July 1996. [12]
Squid is now developed almost exclusively through volunteer efforts.
Basic functionality[edit]
After a Squid proxy server is installed, web browsers can be configured to use it as a proxy HTTP server, allowing Squid to retain copies of the documents returned, which, on repeated requests for the same documents, can reduce access time as well as bandwidth consumption. This is often useful for Internet service providers to increase speed to their customers, and LANs that share an Internet connection. Because the caching servers are controlled by the web service operator, caching proxies do not anonymize the user and should not be confused with anonymizing proxies.
A client program (e. g. browser) either has to specify explicitly the proxy server it wants to use (typical for ISP customers), or it could be using a proxy without any extra configuration: “transparent caching”, in which case all outgoing HTTP requests are intercepted by Squid and all responses are cached. The latter is typically a corporate set-up (all clients are on the same LAN) and often introduces the privacy concerns mentioned above.
Squid has some features that can help anonymize connections, such as disabling or changing specific header fields in a client’s HTTP requests. Whether these are set, and what they are set to do, is up to the person who controls the computer running Squid. People requesting pages through a network which transparently uses Squid may not know whether this information is being logged. [14] Within UK organisations at least, users should be informed if computers or internet connections are being monitored. [15]
Reverse proxy[edit]
The above setup—caching the contents of an unlimited number of webservers for a limited number of clients—is the classical one. Another setup is “reverse proxy” or “webserver acceleration” (using _port 80 accel vhost). In this mode, the cache serves an unlimited number of clients for a limited number of—or just one—web servers.
As an example, if is a “real” web server, and is the Squid cache server that “accelerates” it, the first time any page is requested from, the cache server would get the actual page from, but later requests would get the stored copy directly from the accelerator (for a configurable period, after which the stored copy would be discarded). The end result, without any action by the clients, is less traffic to the source server, meaning less CPU and memory usage, and less need for bandwidth. This does, however, mean that the source server cannot accurately report on its traffic numbers without additional configuration, as all requests would seem to have come from the reverse proxy. A way to adapt the reporting on the source server is to use the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header reported by the reverse proxy, to get the real client’s IP address.
It is possible for a single Squid server to serve both as a normal and a reverse proxy simultaneously. For example, a business might host its own website on a web server, with a Squid server acting as a reverse proxy between clients (customers accessing the website from outside the business) and the web server. The same Squid server could act as a classical web cache, caching HTTP requests from clients within the business (i. e., employees accessing the internet from their workstations), so accelerating web access and reducing bandwidth demands.
Media-range limitations[edit]
For example, a feature of the HTTP protocol is to limit a request to the range of data in the resource being referenced. This feature is used extensively by video streaming websites such as YouTube, so that if a user clicks to the middle of the video progress bar, the server can begin to send data from the middle of the file, rather than sending the entire file from the beginning and the user waiting for the preceding data to finish loading.
Partial downloads are also extensively used by Microsoft Windows Update so that extremely large update packages can download in the background and pause halfway through the download, if the user turns off their computer or disconnects from the Internet.
The Metalink download format enables clients to do segmented downloads by issuing partial requests and spreading these over a number of mirrors.
Squid can relay partial requests to the origin web server. In order for a partial request to be satisfied at a fast speed from cache, Squid requires a full copy of the same object to already exist in its storage.
If a proxy video user is watching a video stream and browses to a different page before the video completely downloads, Squid cannot keep the partial download for reuse and simply discards the data. Special configuration is required to force such downloads to continue and be cached. [16]
Supported operating systems[edit]
Squid can run on the following operating systems:
AIX
BSDI
Digital Unix
FreeBSD
HP-UX
IRIX
Linux
macOS
NetBSD
NeXTStep
OpenBSD
OS/2 (including ArcaOS and eComStation)[17]
SCO OpenServer
Solaris
UnixWare
Windows[18]
See also[edit]
Web accelerator which discusses host-based HTTP acceleration
Proxy server which discusses client-side proxies
Reverse proxy which discusses origin-side proxies
Comparison of web servers
References[edit]
^ “Who looks after the Squid project? “.
^ “Squid version 4”. Retrieved 5 June 2021.
^ “What is the Best OS for Squid? “.
^ “Squid License”.
^ “Squid Project Logo”. Retrieved 6 July 2014.
^ “Squid FAQ: About Squid”. 13 February 2007. Archived from the original on 29 December 2007. Retrieved 13 February 2007.
^ “Squid 3. 5 for Windows”. February 2019. Current build is based on Squid 3. 5. 1 build for Cygwin Windows 64 bit
^ Bowman, Peter B. Danzig, Darren R. Hardy, Udi Manper, Michael F. Schwartz, The Harvest information discovery and access system, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Volume 28, Issues 1–2, December 1995, Pages 119–125. doi:10. 1016/0169-7552(95)00098-5
^ Squid intro, on the Squid website
^ Harvest cache now available as an “d accelerator”, by Mike Schwartz on the -wg mailing list, Tue, 4 April 1995, as forwarded by Brian Behlendorf to the Apache HTTP Server developers’ mailing list
^ “Squid Sponsors”. Archived from the original on 11 May 2007. Retrieved 13 February 2007. The NSF was the primary funding source for Squid development from 1996–2000. Two grants (#NCR-9616602, #NCR-9521745) received through the Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR) Division were administered by the University of California San Diego
^ a b Duane Wessels Squid and ICP: Past, Present, and Future, Proceedings of the Australian Unix Users Group. September 1997, Brisbane, Australia
^ “”. Archived from the original on 12 November 1996. Retrieved 7 August 2012.
^ See the documentation for header_access and header_replace for further details.
^ See, for example, Computer Monitoring In The Workplace and Your Privacy
^ “Squid Configuration Reference”. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
^ OS/2 Ports by Paul Smedley, OS/2 Ports
^
Further reading[edit]
Wessels, Duane (2004). Squid: The Definitive Guide. O’Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0-596-00162-9.
Saini, Kulbir (2011). Squid Proxy Server 3. 1: Beginner’s Guide. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1-849-51390-6.
External links[edit]
Official website
Squid Blog
Squid User’s Guide
Squid Transparent Proxy For DD-WRT
Squid reverse proxy — Create a reverse proxy with Squid
Configuration Manual — ViSolve Squid Configuration Manual Guide
Configuration Manual — Authoritative Squid Configuration Options
“Solaris Setup”. Archived from the original on 15 January 2008. — Setup squid on solaris
SQUID – Installation on CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat
Frequently Asked Questions about squid proxy windows
Does Squid work on Windows?
Click the Squid for Windows icon in the tray menu and select Start Squid Service. 9. You can verify that the Squid service is running in the services. msc snap-in (look for Squid for Windows).
What does Squid proxy do?
Squid is a caching and forwarding HTTP web proxy. It has a wide variety of uses, including speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources, and aiding security by filtering traffic.
How do I download Squid proxy server?
Installing Squid Proxy on UbuntuStep 1: Refresh the Software Repositories. Ensure you’re working with the latest software version available. Launch a terminal window, and enter the following: sudo apt-get update.Step 2: Install Squid Package on Ubuntu. To install Squid, run the command: sudo apt-get install squid.Feb 15, 2019