The problem is sometimes the people who have Internet access have to set the proxy in order to browse.

But from time to time they get "The page cannot be displayed" in Internet Explorer .

If they deselect squid all works fine.

But from time to time the error message comes again and they have to put the squid back .

And the most strange of all is that at a particular moment of time a number of users have the proxy set, and another number of users have the proxy unset in order to have Internet access

I have a small network of computers (64), and 35 of them have access to the Internet through a Debian 30 r2 (kernel 2.4.18) with a firewall and a Squid. The users have full Internet access through FOWARD chain or they can use Squid Through INPUT chain.

I'm pretty confused about this problem !

Please help!

Thank you in advance !

By that do you mean you're running squid on all 35 of those machines, or that squid is running on your gateway machine only? The latter is all you need.

Assuming the latter is what you have, first place I would look is your squid log files. Sometimes squid just cuts out without telling you (except in the log) because (for example) the disk is full, or another service is interfering with its port.

Another idea is to use another browser - IE's message "the page could not be desplayed" is useless, whereas with something like mozilla you would get "your proxy server is not responding; check that your settings are correct", or "could not resolve host" etc - it gives you an ideas as to what the problem may be.

Thank you for your suggestions!

I installed Mozilla,

the error in mozilla with the proxy set is : "the connection was refused when attempting to contact the proxy server you have configured. please check your proxy settings and try again."

If set on direct connection to Internet it works fine.

I looked in squid's logs. (access, cache, store)

I don't know squid, but there wasn't anything "strange" in the logs.

I shall survey the situation closer, so that to check the log when the change appears.

Is there something special to look for, or shoul I enable some special loging?

Thank you in advance!!!

squid can't be reached from that hosts at that moment. that tells the error message. so the prob may be in the iptables config or the network or the squid proxy has a problem with the request (unlikely). does iptables report dropped packets? how's your squid.conf? have you enabled acl's auth_param? squid version?

sl mritch.

Thank you mritch for your sugestions !

The firewall seems unchanged in the important points for a long time and it workd fine for several months. The squid also worked well. In squid there aren't authentication filters, and no strange acl-s. (Squid Cache: Version 2.5.STABLE6).

Recently i talked to a person who have had similar problems to mine and he sugested me to do "remake" the cache.

/etc/init.d/squid stop
deleting manualy all files in /var/spool/squid
squid -z #to create swap directories (and if it doesn't work chmod 777 to /var/spool/squid)
/etc/init.d/squid start

I did this and all seems to work fine! I hope this will solve my problems.

Thank you all of you who helped me!!!

Have a good day