# Peculiarities

There are a couple of things that are different with Varnish Cache, as opposed to other programs. One thing you’ve already seen - VCL. In this section we provide a very quick tour of other peculiarities you need to know about to get the most out of Varnish.

## Configuration

The Varnish Configuration is written in VCL. When Varnish is ran this configuration is transformed into C code and then fed into a C compiler, loaded and executed.

So, as opposed to switching various settings on or off, you write polices on how the incoming traffic should be handled.

## varnishadm

Varnish Cache has an admin console. You can connect it through the varnishadm command. In order to connect the user needs to be able to read /etc/varnish/secret in order to authenticate.

Once you’ve started the console you can do quite a few operations on Varnish, like stopping and starting the cache process, load VCL, adjust the built in load balancer and invalidate cached content.

It has a built in command “help” which will give you some hints on what it does.

## varnishlog

Varnish does not log to disk. Instead it logs to a chunk of memory. It is actually streaming the logs. At any time you’ll be able to connect to the stream and see what is going on. Varnish logs quite a bit of information. You can have a look at the logstream with the command varnishlog.