Installing a Squid Proxy Server on a CentOS Linux machine is pretty easy. Thanks to the command “yum” which allows you to download the needed packages for the said software. You just have to make sure that your Linux box is connected to the Internet since the packages are downloaded from remote repositories. In the first place, what’s the point of installing a proxy server on a machine that’s not connected to the Internet. 
This tutorial or a mini-howto only shows the most basic installation. It’s just some sort of an out of the box installation if you prefer it that way. Oftentimes, applications or services downloaded through yum usually works with its default settings, but in the case of the Squid Proxy Server you have to tweak a few configurations to make things work.
Let’s start. 
1. First of all, login to your machine as the root user and then issue the following command:
$> yum install squid
2. Then just follow the instructions and select “Yes” or press “Y” when asked if you want to continue with the installation.
3. After the needed packages have been downloaded and installed don’t try to start the Squid Proxy Server just yet. You would only receive some sort of errors regarding some lines of the config file. So before starting anything edit the file /etc/squid/squid.conf by doing the following:
Find the line visible_hostname and then give it a value. Usually this is the hostname of your PC including the domain name:
visible_hostname squidproxy.domain.com
By default the Squid Proxy Server restricts serving proxy requests from other hosts so you have to add your network to the access list. If for example your LAN network is defined as 192.168.120.0/255.255.255.255, add the following lines:
acl mynetwork src 192.168.120.0/255.255.255.255
http_access allow mynetwork
4. Now you can start the Squid Proxy Server using the command:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/squid start
That’s it, you now have a working Squid Proxy Server. Please remember, this is just the most basic configuration for running it. There are a lot of other things you can do with this proxy server and also some ways to improve the performance which I didn’t cover here. You can visit the Squid Proxy Server website at http://www.squid-cache.org for more information.
Happy proxying! 
[tags]Squid Proxy Server, CentOS, Linux, Networking[/tags]
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