This article looks at installing a Squid proxy server on Ubuntu 18.04. First let’s look at what a proxy is. What is a Proxy A proxy is an intermediary between two systems. This can be a proxy server caching images onto a network so each subsequent visitor gets a better, faster experience or a proxy can be an Apple Software Update Server running on macOS server that is specifically tuned to cache slices of apps so large networks don’t get crushed when downloading software. These are known as forward proxies. There are also reverse proxies, which live on the side of a web server and proxy incoming requests. Tomcat, Apache…

These days, when using AWS, we usually use Amazon’s Route 53 service for DNS. It’s nearly free and super-simple. But there are several reasons why we might choose to use a DNS server of our own. These days, while bind9 continues to be an exceptional choice, when scripting or containerizing, dnsmasq is often far easier to automate against (although unless there are a crapload of domains, not as easy as route53). So let’s look at a basic setup real quick. Before we start, it’s worth noting that for dns host resolvers to work in EC2 instances the security group for a vm needs to have 53 UDP open for ingress…