I used to have a virtual machine that acted as a transparent proxy, but as of late thought i’d move squid onto my host box (opensolaris). This way hopefully increasing the amount of free ram available to the host while also taking advantage of ZFS etc…
So this is a very brief guide on how to configure your opensolaris 2008.11 box as a transparent proxy. Essentially meaning if you set the solaris box as the default gateway all web traffic will be cached as it goes through it before it goes onto your dls router or outside connection.
At this point i’m assuming that your opensolaris box can access the web without issue. The config i have loaded on my box points DNS and the default route straight to my dsl router. If you have having problems getting to the web it may be the DNS problem discussed here : https://sigtar.com/2009/02/11/opensolaris-manual-network-config-issue/
First step is to enable IP forwarding;
svcadm enable ipv4-forwarding
Then install the squid package though package manager – search for “squid” and install
Configure squid via /etc/squid/squid.conf file. Find the http_port setting and add “transparent” to the required line like so…
http_port 3128 transparent
Find the network acl and add your subnet to the required line. My subnet is 192.168.4.0/24 so it should look like this. (note: you can have multiple subnets so i have two in the following example). You may need to uncomment the line…
acl our_networks src 192.168.4.0/24 192.168.2.0/24
http_access allow our_networks
Update : i had some problems with web traffic slowing down and stalling eventually over time so i have made an additional update to the /etc/squid/squid.conf file…
httpd_accel_no_pmtu_disc on
Run /usr/squid/sbin/squid -z to create the swap directories.
The default disk cache size in squid as of writing is 100MB, i usually increase mine to 30GB since disk is cheap). I also move my disk cache to a faster disk array and also increase the maximum cached object size to 1000 MB – but probably isn’t required for the small load that i would generate. Here are some of the additional changes i make (optional);
refresh_pattern . 0 80% 10080 reload-into-ims
maximum_object_size 1000 MB
I have made another post that details increasing your hit ratio here : https://sigtar.com/2009/06/10/squid-optimizing-cache-hits/
Run /usr/squid/sbin/squid
Check for any issues in the cache log located at /var/squid/logs/cache.log
You should test your proxy at the default port of 3128 first. i.e. setup the proxy details in Internet Explorer / FireFox to point to your solaris box ipaddress:3128
Next you need to redirect traffic hitting the solaris box on port 80 to 3128 (the transparent port forwarding) like so…
First enable the ipfilter service… (no iptables in solaris)
svcadm enable ipfilter
create a file called /etc/ipf/ipnat.conf, and place this rule in it; (this file should be auto loaded at startup)
rdr e1000g1 0.0.0.0/0 port 80 -> 127.0.0.1 port 3128
This redirects my nic (e1000g1) any network port 80 to the local loopback port 3128. To load this rule type; (clears current rules and loads file)
ipnat -Cf /etc/ipf/ipnat.conf
to check if its working and loaded type ipnat -l
Browse some websites from your web client, and check the squid logs that all http requests are hitting the cache. default log location is /var/squid/logs/access.log
Set your DHCP to point to your solaris box as the default gateway. Done. In most cases your dsl router if it has DHCP will not allow you to change your default gateway. If this is the case you will need to setup your own DHCP server and define the opensolaris box as the default gateway. The DHCP scope can point the clients to the dsl router for DNS, only the default gateway needs to be changed.
Set squid to autostart at boot via SMF manifest;
svcadm enable svc:/network/http:squid
Done