To give you an idea of what Squid is, we will reproduce the following bullets from Squid's home page (http://www.squid-cache.org/):

Squid is...

  • A full-featured web proxy cache

  • Designed to run on Unix systems

  • Free, open source software

  • The result of many contributions by unpaid volunteers

  • Funded by the National Science Foundation

Squid supports...

  • Proxying and caching of HTTP, FTP, and other URLs

  • Proxying for SSL

  • Cache hierarchies

  • ICP, HTCP, CARP, and Cache Digests

  • Transparent caching

  • WCCP (Squid v2.3)

  • Extensive access controls

  • httpd server acceleration

  • SNMP

  • Caching of DNS lookups