darkness

I had a particular web application today that wasn’t working through the default RH Squid install, plus transparent proxying. Symptom:

• Open browser (IE), open the given URL, get login page
• Login
• Close all browser windows (not logging out of the web application)
• Open new browser window, open the given URL, get 500 server error

First I tried removing the objects from the cache. On this RH 8.0 box, squidclient was called just client:

[root@gateway root]# /usr/sbin/client -m PURGE -h 127.0.0.1 http://offending/url
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Squid/2.4.STABLE7
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 23:53:13 GMT
Content-Length: 0
X-Cache: MISS from gateway
Proxy-Connection: close

[root@gateway root]#

This made the 500 go away, until someone else logged in. Then everyone (except the logged in person, I think) would get 500 errors again. So then I tried forcing Squid to go direct for the site in question. This didn’t work either.

Finally, I read the FAQ on not caching anything and used the no_cache directive with the ACL I created when trying always_direct. Then I had to make sure to clean out (using the above method) any cached pages from that site. Then I apparently had to do a service squid restart. Finally, the site seems to work normally.