[squid-users] User Authentication Begins Failing

I've been having an intermittent problem with user authentication over the
last couple of months. For reasons I've yet to understand, users will all
of a sudden not be able to authenticate (we're using ncsa_auth) to Squid
despite providing valid credentials (confirmed with debug_options ALL,1
29,9) ; Squid will repeatedly prompt the user for authentication and
ultimate deny access due to authentication failure.
 
Basically, we have users directed to one of two proxy's (Solaris 8,
Squid-2.5.STABLE10) via a proxy auto configuration file. We ftp out a
password file (about 75K) to both proxy's which overwrites the active
password file used by Squid.
 
The problem appears to occur against each proxy simultaneously and so we had
suspected a problem with the fact that we're overwriting the active password
file (although we confirmed it is being ftp'ed out intact)but we've not been
able to establish any correlation. Also, tried increasing auth_param basic
children but to no avail.
 
Ultimately, the symptoms 'go away' after a few minutes or alternatively
we're able to stabilize things by bouncing squid issuing a 'squid -k
reconfigure' ; interestingly after doing this we observe several 'Clearing
cache ACL results for user: <username>' entries in cache.log where
<username> matches the account name of a user actively experiencing the
problem.
 
Would appreciate any insights? Thank-you.
 
 
Regards,
 
Sergio Di Geronimo
SIEMENS
Siemens IT Solutions and Services
Received on Wed Sep 05 2007 - 20:56:10 MDT