Configuring System Preferences

The Configure System Preferences page enables you to set up or change the basic aspects of your server. The page allows you to do the following:

• Change the server user, the number of processes, listen queue size, proxy timeout, and timeout after interrupt for your proxy server

• Enable DNS, ICP, proxy arrays, and parent arrays

The preference options are:

• Server User. The Server User is the user account that the proxy uses. The user name you enter as the proxy server user should already exist as a normal user account. When the server starts, it runs as if it were started by this user.

  If you want to avoid creating a new user account, you can choose an account used by another server running on the same host, or if you are running a UNIX proxy, you can choose the user nobody. However, on some systems the user nobody can own files but cannot run programs, which would make it unsuitable as the proxy user name.

  On a UNIX system, all the processes that the proxy spawns are assigned to the server user account.

• Processes. The Processes field shows how many processes are available to service requests. By default, the value is 1. Do not modify this setting unless required.

• Listen Queue Size. The Listen Queue Size field specifies the maximum number of pending connections on a listen socket.

• DNS. A Domain Name Service (DNS) restores IP addresses into host names. When a web browser connects to your server, the server gets only the client’s IP address, for example, 198.18.251.30. The server does not have the host name information, such as www.example.com. For access logging and access control, the server can resolve the IP address into a host name. On the Configure System Preferences page, you can tell the server whether or not to resolve IP addresses into host names.

• ICP. The Internet Cache Protocol (ICP) is a message-passing protocol that enables caches to communicate with one another. Caches can use ICP to send queries and replies about the existence of cached URLs and about the best locations from which to retrieve those URLs. You can enable ICP on the Configure System Preferences page. For more information on ICP, see Routing Through ICP Neighborhoods.

• Proxy Array. A proxy array is an array of proxies serving as one cache for the purposes of distributed caching. If you enable the proxy array option on the Configure System Preferences page, that means that the proxy server you are configuring is a member of a proxy array, and that all other members in the array are its siblings. For more information on using proxy arrays, see Routing Through Proxy Arrays.

• Parent Array. A parent array is a proxy array that a proxy or proxy array member routes through. So, if a proxy routes through an upstream proxy array before accessing a remote server, the upstream proxy array is considered the parent array. For more information on using parent arrays with your proxy server, see Routing Through Parent Arrays.

• Proxy Timeout. The proxy timeout is the maximum time between successive network data packets from the remote server before the proxy server times out the request. The default value for proxy timeout is 5 minutes.

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  Note –

  When the remote server uses server-push and the delay between pages is longer than the proxy timeout, the connection could be terminated before the transmission is done. Instead, use client-pull, which sends multiple requests to the proxy.

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To Modify the System Preferences

1. Access the Server Manager and click the Preferences tab.

2. Click the Configure System Preferences link.

   The Configure System Preferences page is displayed.

3. Change the options, and then click OK.

4. Click Restart Required.

   The Apply Changes page is displayed.

5. Click the Restart Proxy Server button to apply the changes.