[ILUG] Making squid work

[Niall O Broin]

Well, I finally have my caching DNS server running (although only with a
forwarder - wouldn't work otherwise but that doesn't much bother me as it
seems only sensible to use my provider's server as a forwarder as it's
likely to have a lot of what I want cached.

But I'm now puzzled by the behaviour of squid. I use a number of sites on a
regular basis which use quite a number of static graphics but it seems that
squid doesn't cache them (actually, it does, but it doesn't give them back -
stay with me).

Test setup is as follows:

Netscape 4.77 with disk caching turned off (shouldn't need it, if squid's
doing its thing).

Squid Version 2.3.STABLE4-hno.CVS as delivered with SuSE 7.2 with the cache
emptied and remade with squid -z. A marker file is created called /tmp/SQUID.

Take for example  www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives, a site which I
visit now and then :-) This has about a dozen static GIFs - they're the same
every day, and the page totals about 60K. I expect that when I get that page
squid will cache all the GIFs and the next time I get the page, the GIFs
will just flow in nicely from my squid cache but that's not what happens.

I start Netscape and load the page and wait about 20 seconds while it all
loads up. Then I use find on the squid cache to find files newer than the
marker - sure enough, all the GIFs from the page are there in the cache  (as
are a number of files like  squid-internal-static/icons/anthony-?????.gif
where ????? is movie, trab, bomb and various others - what on earth are
they ?, although that's a separate question)

Then I quit Netscape and start it again and load the same page - again I
must wait until they're downloaded from userfriendly - they're certainly NOT
coming out of the squid cache. In the squid access log I get a load of
TCP_CLIENT_REFRESH_MISS/200  lines for each of these GIFs and in the store
log I get a load of RELEASE and SWAPOUT lines for each of them.

In the cached files there are Last-Modified: dates for the GIFs and they're
all some time ago so why on earth does squid not just hand them to me
instead of fetching them again ?

If any of you have squid running in such a way that it does properly cache
that page's GIFs (and bear in mind that you won't know that unless you turn
off your Netscape disk caching and of course restart Netscape between each
attempt) would you please send me your squid.conf so that I can try to see
what on earth is wrong with mine.



Niall