[ILUG] Making squid work

[Wesley Darlington]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 06:44:17PM +0100, Niall O Broin wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 11:36:52AM -0400, Wesley Darlington wrote:
> > Apols for even mentioning this but is your computer's time correct?
> You're forgiven :-) but it's close enough - within one minute of my cesium
> clock's display.

Ooooh - Shiny!

> in access.log. So why does Netscape, on the same box as squid, hate me ?

I've been doing some more investigating here. I've noticed that from time
to time I get TCP_MISSes when I reload the page. Aiee - you've broken my
netscape! :-)

I then told netscape to stop using squid, kept the caches at zero, fired up 
sniffit and tried getting Netscape to reload the page. I looked in sniffit's 
files and what do I see, but things like...

GET /images/brugervenlig.gif HTTP/1.0
Referer: http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.18-lvm-reiserfs-r i686)
Pragma: no-cache
Host: graphics.userfriendly.org
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8

Note that "Pragma: no-cache" in there. Stupid damn browser! (I can't see
an easy way to sniff just the traffic that netscape sends to my local
squid.)

I wonder ... if you go back to the other computer and do some reloading,
do you now get some MISSes? I'm doing a combination of reloading a few
times and looking at another page and going back to the UF cartoon
archive page.

(Thought: Does your laptop have the same time as the squid box?)

Just did some more testing. My squid.conf had the line...

#refresh_pattern        .               0       20%     4320

...in it. (ie. commented out.) I changed this to...

refresh_pattern        .               0       20%     4320	reload-into-ims

...and I now get TCP_HITs or sometimes TCP_REFRESH_HITs. I assume that
squid is doing an if-modified-since request of some sort. If I change
reload-into-ims to ignore-reload, I get only TCP_HITs. I get no MISSes. [0]

Perhaps violating http in this way will help squid compensate for netscape's
apparent brokenness?

Wesley.

[0] When I say `I only get TCP_HITs' and `I get no MISSes', I'm only 
    talking about the images that should be cached, like slovenia.gif and
    brukervennlig.gif, not the ads etc that the *server* is (I assume) 
    saying shouldn't be cached.