$Id: Release-Notes-1.1.txt,v 1.4 1996/08/17 05:11:42 wessels Exp $ Release Notes for version 1.1 of the Squid cache. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Ident (RFC 931) lookups Asynchronous Disk I/O URL Redirector Reverse IP Lookups, client hostname ACLs. Cache directory structure changes Ident (RFC 931) lookups ============================================================================== Squid will make an RFC931/ident request for client connections if 'ident_lookup' is enabled in the config file. Currently, the ident value is only logged with the request in the access.log. It is not currently (1.1.alpha6) possible to use the ident return value for access control purposes. Asynchronous Disk I/O ============================================================================== Pete Bentley has contributed a module for asynchronous disk I/O. To enable, you must define USE_ASYNC_IO (e.g. in the Makefile, or include/config.h). It should compile for both IRIX 5.3 and Solaris 2.x. However, due to some of the underlying routines and structures in disk.[ch], asynchronous I/O is not be efficiently implemented yet. There can only be one outstanding aio_write() call per return from the select loop. The standard disk I/O routines write all pending blocks per return from select(). I do NOT recommend using these aio with Squid just yet. URL Redirector ============================================================================== Squid now has the ability to rewrite requested URLs. This is implemented as an external process, much like the dnsservers. Every incoming URL is written to a 'redirector' process which then returns a new URL, or a blank line to inidicate no change. The redirector program is NOT provided in the Squid package. Currently, it is up to the individual users to write their own implementation. For testing, this very simple Perl script can be used: #!/usr/local/bin/perl $|=1; print while (<>); The redirector program must read URLs (one per line) on standard input, and write rewritten URLs or blank lines on standard output. Note that the redirector program can not use buffered I/O. Additional information is written after the URL which a redirector can use to make a decision. The input line consists of four fields: URL ip-address/fqdn ident method The ip-address is always written, the fqdn will be provided if available (otherwise it will be "-"). Similarly, the user ident will be provided if available (i.e. 'ident_lookup on' in config file). The method is GET, POST, etc.. Note that when used in conjunction with the -V option (on a virtual hosted machine) this provides a mechanism to use a single Squid cache as a front end to numerous servers on different machines. URLs written to the redirector will look like: http://192.0.0.1/foo http://192.0.0.2/foo The redirector program might be this Perl script: #!/usr/local/bin/perl $|=1; while (<>) { s@http://192\.0\.0\.1@http://www1.foo.org@; s@http://192\.0\.0\.2@http://www2.foo.org@; print; } You may receive statistics on the redirector usage by requesting the following 'cache_object' URL: % client cache_object://localhost/stats/redirector Reverse IP Lookups, client hostname ACLs. ============================================================================== Squid now has a address-to-hostname cache ("fqdncache") much like the name-to-address cache ("ipcache"). This means Squid can now write client hostnames in the access log, and that client domain names can be used in ACL expressions. If you would like to log hostnames instead of addresses, enable 'log_fqdn' in your config file. This causes a reverse-lookup to be started just after the client connection has been accepted. If the reverse lookup has completed by the time the entry gets logged, the fully qualified domain name will be used, otherwise the IP address is still logged. Squid does not wait for the reverse lookup before logging the access (but this may be changed in the future). A new ACL type has been added for matching client hostnames: acl Myusers srcdomain foo.org The use of this ACL type may cause noticable delay in serving objects through the cache. However, so long as allowed clients are local, the reverse lookup should not take very long and the delay may not be noticed. Only the FQDN (i.e. the h_name field) is used for the comparison, host aliases are *not* checked. If a reverse lookup fails, the word "none" will be used for the comparison. If you wanted to deny access to clients which did not map back to valid names, you could use acl BadClients srcdomain none http_access deny BadClients NOTE: DNS has a number of known security problems. Squid does not make any effort to guarantee the validity of data returned from gethostbyname() or gethostbyaddr() calls. Cache directory structure changes ============================================================================== Squid-1.1 uses a different directory structure for cache files. Squid-1.0 used 100 directories for each 'cache_dir'. Squid-1.1 uses a two level structure with 16 first-level directories, and 256 second level directories. In addition, directory and file names are in hexadecimal, and fixed length. These changes mean that Squid-1.1 will fail to reload metadata from a Squid-1.0 swap log.