I have a machine which is running an up-to-date Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation on which I wanted to run Squid. Installing it was a snap – just run sudo apt-get install squid3, and you’re set … or are you? Trying to use the proxy I get an unexpected "Connection refused" message. Investigating a bit further, I see that there’s nothing listening on port 3128 (the default Squid port), nor is Squid runninng. Strange! /var/log/messages reveals a string of messages of the following form:
squid[18518]: Squid Parent: child process 18536 started squid[18518]: Squid Parent: child process 18536 exited due to signal 6
After a few tries, Squid just dies. /var/log/squid/cache.log contains only
Creating Swap Directories /var/spool/squid3 exists Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/00 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/01 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/02 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/03 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/04 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/05 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/06 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/07 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/08 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/09 Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0A Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0B Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0C Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0D Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0E Making directories in /var/spool/squid3/0F
Squid had no problems starting and doing some initial housekeeping before stumbling. Running squid3 -d 10 produced a ton of debug output, but also this telling error message:
FATAL: Cannot open '/var/log/squid3/access.log' for writing. The parent directory must be writeable by the user 'proxy', which is the cache_effective_user set in squid.conf.
Ah ha! The default Ubuntu-packaged Squid (3.0.PRE5-5 with MD5sum d11df3af2e309f5b989a520e3cd50d55) is configured to run as the user ‘proxy’, but the associated log-directories are not writable by the user ‘proxy’. That’s easy enough to solve.
cd /var/log/squid3 sudo chown proxy cache.log . sudo /etc/init.d/squid3 start
This time Squid was able to start successfully. Another few seconds were needed to configure the proper ACLs, but after that and a Squid restart later, we’re good to go!
This is _verbatim_ the issue I was having – so thank you so much for the info. It took me forever to realize what the issue was, but once I did, (with your post) it was an easy solution.
Just as an FYI, running: “/usr/sbin/squid3 -NCd1” allowed me to see that I was getting permissions errors on cache.log and access.log (which led me to your post). I was hoping, from that command, to see a core dump 🙂
Thanks again.
P.S. Just an FYI I added a link to your site on my blog: http://waxingcatatonic.blogspot.com/2008/04/squid-file-permissions.html