Installing Squid with VuFind® in 10 minutes

These instructions were written in reference to an installation of VuFind® 1.0RC1; some details may be out of date.

Due to Syndetics network/service issues, Western Michigan University implemented a reverse proxy cache for particular third party vendors. Squid is an open source reverse proxy cache. It can cache and store third party content locally, thus improving response times.

In our case, we use a separate server to increase performance. Squid can either be installed on the VuFind® server or separately. However, due to its system load, it is recommended that Squid be installed on a secondary machine (we used an Intel Xeon 3.0ghz 800mhz bus, 2 Gig DDR2, 1 terabyte non-RAID disk). In these instructions, the base operating system is RedHat 5.2/CentOS http://www.centos.org/.

• Large Partitions
• Swap should be 2x or more of RAM

• [root@Squidbox] yum update -y

• [root@Squidbox] reboot

• [root@Squidbox] setup
• Follow GUI

• [root@Squidbox] yum install squid -y

• replace this with the /etc/squid/squid.conf

Note 1: 165.254.62.247 is the IP of syndetics.com Note 2: 3128 is the default port

#Squid Conf

http_port 3128 defaultsite=syndetics.com

cache_peer   165.254.62.247 parent 80 0 no-query originserver

acl our_sites dstdomain syndetics.com

http_access allow our_sites

#disk swap
cache_swap_high 95

cache_swap_low 90

#ram ram ram

cache_mem 32 MB


#End Squid Conf

[root@Squidbox]/sbin/chkconfig –add squid

[root@Squidbox]/sbin/service squid start

Adjust VuFind® to access your Squid box's IP address instead of the normal URLs. Depending on the service you are using, you may be able to adjust config.ini; otherwise, you will have to edit code.

For our instance, we had to go through and hand edit code retrieving book covers, excerpts and reviews and replace http://syndetics.com with yoursquidboxip.