Server Administration > Squid. The definitive guide > Chapter 6. All About Access Controls

Access controls are the most important part of your Squid configuration file. You'll use them to grant access to your authorized users and to keep out the bad guys. You can use them to restrict, or prevent access to, certain material; to control request rewriting; to route requests through a hierarchy; and to support different qualities of service.

Access controls are built from two different components. First, you define a number of access control list (ACL) elements. These elements refer to specific aspects of client requests, such as IP addresses, URL hostnames, request methods, and origin server port numbers. After defining the necessary elements, you combine them into a number of access list rules. The rules apply to particular services or operations within Squid. For example, the http_access rules are applied to incoming HTTP requests. I cover the access control elements first, and then the rules later in this chapter.