Re: [squid-users] Redirection - How to in English fornonprogrammers...

>>> On Monday, 16 February 2009 at 12:52 pm, in message
<1234750932.13574_at_davidwbrown.name>, <david_at_davidwbrown.name> wrote:
> Hello Geoffrey, I have not gone with the default anything on Linux in 10
> years. It is only a headache.

Ok, I'm not sure why they would want to put it where the default is anyway.

The problem I'm having is figuring out where it actually IS installed.

This appears to be a pre-build configuration item. Don't ask me why, because it seems silly.

> I have run Suse in the past but I don't
> recollect if there are any bug-a-boos about Suse that come to mind.

It seems to work well enough. I've had very little trouble with it. The box its on is
an ex workstation and it seems to cope quite well. Squid seems to work pretty well
on it, the only issue I'm having seems to be this redirect script thing which so far refuses
to work.

> That being
> said I would almost guarantee that any flavor of Linux as preferable with the
> exception of Debian/Ubuntu that a good ol' tarball of Squid should fix your
> issues.

Getting it to update the existing version is going to be the hardest part.
I've yet to find the right part of the documentation for that.

I suppose I can remove the old version and just do a clean install of 3.0, but I'm not
at all sure how to go about removing the version that's already there.

Obviously I would much prefer that the 3.0 install simply overwrite the
existing 2.5 install but I have no real idea how to go about that -

That I have no idea where on the darn system it actually lives (aside from squid.conf)
doesn't help and I'm not sure what if any config stuff I have to specify when it's built.

> 2.15 does seem somewhat dated. I only have recently begun using Squid
> again and I started with 2.6 or 2.7 but because I needed some features I now
> find myself with the 3.x version.

I've downloaded the squid 3 stable tar.gz and unpacked it on another SLES10 box
that also has Squid on it (2.15 again - out of the box).

> To run Linux reliably you need to not let
> the individual flavors get you into that Microsoft type thinking that you are
> locked-in.

No problem with that. I just need to figure out how to do an in place upgrade of the
existing (working) squid 2.15 without breaking anything else.

> It appears you are dealing with some type of prod. env.

Yes, at present. We have just one dedicated proxy box. We used to use an 'appliance'
 a 'pizza box' with a dedicated cache, but it broke with the last round of hotmail changes
so I was forced to employ squid since it seems there are no more upgrades for the pizza
box - Cisco bought the cache manufacturer and it now seems to be part of their IronPort
device. So it was squid or nothing... It doesn't perform as well as the Pizza box when it was
working, but it's not too bad.

> I would
> like to suggest you get some Intel based box (almost anything will do as long
> as it has around a gig of mem) and install Squid 3.x. and get aggressive with
> the config such that you gain some confidence with getting your Linux env
> ironment the way you want it.

Figuring out what half the crap in the squid.conf actually means/does is half the problem.
But I have this other SLES10 box I can fiddle with - the squid on it is not being used for anything, so I can fiddle with that
provided I don't need to restart the box itself. (it's our RELOAD server - a backup system for
Novell Groupwise)

Our squid use is fairly basic, we don't authenticate or log, we have an appliance that
takes care of that part, so only interested in it caching and proxying as quick as possible
and (hopefully) getting this port redirect sorted to kludge around this 8080 issue that seems
not to want to play nice on 2.15.

> Getting things to work correctly in a beta or
> dev. environment is much preferred and you can do a lot of config changes
> without worry. So, take the plunge and upgrade to a better Squid. 8) David.

The redirect *seemed* to be quick and easy to implement, I should have known anything to do
with changing *nix based stuff is rarely quick and easy. That much I *have* learned about it so far.
The mere fact you need to have squid call script files in .php or perl to do the redirect is enough to put me off. I don't speak
C, perl, php or java.

I wish they'd just pick ONE script language and leave it at that.

Thanks for all your help and advice, it's appreciated.

Regards

-- 
Geoff Roberts
IT Supervisor
Saint Mark's College
Port Pirie, South Australia
geoffrob_at_stmarks.pp.catholic.edu.au