Squid 2.1.PATCH2 and customising error pages

From: as web server manager <webadm@dont-contact.us>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 11:50:39 +0000 (GMT)

The enhanced ability to customise error pages in Squid 2 is very useful, but
I've got a question...

Squid 2 clearly has the ability to work in a very limited sense as a normal
web server: it can return possibly-customised error pages and it can also
return icons for FTP/gopher directory listings.

Our customised error pages include an image link (it increeases
substantially the chance that users will notice and mention which cache
returned the error page, and read the adjacent comments about common
problems :-), and it looks like it ought to be possible to get that served
by Squid in the same way as the error pages or icons, but I cannot see how.

Those are both used only in special cases known to Squid and it appears not
to look for additional files placed in the same directories (in particular,
in the image file directory) even if you use identically-structured URLs to
those seen in FTP directory listings. It looks as though a hard-coded set of
image files are preloaded into the cache (so extra files there are ignored),
and the error pages are only referenced when the corresponding error arises,
so extra pages there will also be ignored...

I've solved the problem temporarily by putting the image on an Apache server
on another system, but that's "the wrong solution" since it's making cache
error messages dependent (for their completeness) on a totally unrelated
server, whereas it looks like Squid could (but does not) make it possible
for miscellaneous "extras" like this image for the error pages to be served
by Squid itself. That seems a much cleaner approach - any time that the
cache is running, it should be able to serve the error page's image, not
dependent on any other system (or even another server on the same system)
and keeping all the Squid-related management activity in one place.

So:

(a) is it possible at present to get additional documents (in this case an
image, but HTML "common problems"/FAQ pages would be an obvious addition)
served by Squid along with the error pages? If so, how?

(b) If not currently possibly, is support for this planned, and if not yet
planned could it be added to the wishlist? While it would be a bad idea for
Squid to become a general purpose web server (though Apache's added caching
:-), providing limited support for static documents related to the cache
(images, HTML) would be useful and Squid already has to do it for special
cases.

                                John Line

-- 
University of Cambridge WWW manager account (usually John Line)
Send general WWW-related enquiries to webmaster@ucs.cam.ac.uk
Received on Fri Feb 26 1999 - 05:04:56 MST

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