[ILUG] Squid and Firewall

[Niall O Broin]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 05:14:14PM +0000, Paul Kelly wrote:
> 
> > Another Q ... When I use a windows client to my squid proxy, squid seems to
> > dial up, even though it has the requested page(s) in the cache.
> 
> > Is it dns thats causing the dialup ?
> 
> 
> Either that or Squid requesting verification of the page. Check with 
> ethereal or tcpdump.
> 
> > Should I do a local caching nameserver to solve this prob ?
> 
> A caching named would be a Cunning Plan indeed.

This can also be a browser thing. It was driving me demented because squid
was definitely reloading things I knew were in its cache. It was discussed
at length here some time ago. The solution is to make a modification to the
squid configuration which is not RFC compliant but stops a lot of browser
requests for unnecessary refreshing of pages. Unfortunately I'm a little
removed from y squid configuation at the moment so I can't find it right
now. Wesley - do you remember what it was because we had a lot of back and
forth on it as you might remember.

The specific test page I was citing was the front page of User Friendly
where the flags are. Thes flags don't change - they're simply static images
but because Netscape sometimes requests tem in a particular way back they
come again. The squid config file mod. turns this request into an "If
Modified Since" which is absolutely rational behaviour, whatever about its
RFC non-compliance.

This also made quite a difference for me work wise - I wasn't jsut trying to
speed up UF :-)



Niall