*BSD News Article 57908


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!ames!usenet.kornet.nm.kr!usenet.hana.nm.kr!usenet.seri.re.kr!news.kreonet.re.kr!news.dacom.co.kr!news.netins.net!newsrelay.netins.net!solaris.cc.vt.edu!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!nntp.hk.super.net!rssd.hk.olivetti.com!raju
From: raju@rssd.hk.olivetti.com (Raju M. Daryanani)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix
Subject: CERN httpd caching problem
Date: 22 Dec 1995 04:01:13 GMT
Organization: Olivetti (HK) Ltd.
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <4bdai9$pd5@rssd.hk.olivetti.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rssd.hk.olivetti.com
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:11275 comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix:8257

I'm trying to set up a caching web proxy using CERN httpd on a FreeBSD
2.0.5 box.  The box is a 386DX/25 with 16MB RAM, but only 170MB of disk,
so I'm mounting a partition off an Olivetti SVR4.0 UNIX server using NFS
for the document cache.  I can't use the Olivetti box to run the
proxy because the name resolution routines seem to have a bug in them which
causes the httpd to fail to resolve a name when the FQDN is an alias
to another FQDN and there is no reverse lookup address defined, i.e.,
x.x.x.x.in-addr.arpa. (confused?  I was).

Anyway, I had no problem using the ports collection to build and install
the httpd and it seems to run fine, except it doesn't cache any html 
documents.  It does cache gifs and other graphics, and occassionally there
will be a file called .cache_welcome which contains the index.html
file.  Once I've seen a file with a .htm extension, but never any .html
files.  The odd thing is that I was running the proxy on an Olivetti UNIX
server until I discovered the name resolver bug and I'm using the
same config file under FreeBSD.  The caching worked perfectly on the Olivetti
UNIX except we couldn't access some sites.

I did have some problems with the user id setup, since the CERN documentation
recommends using user nobody as the one to run the web proxy.  SVR4 and BSD
seem to have different interpretations of who nobody is, in SVR4 it's 60001,
in FreeBSD it's 65534.  To simplify things I've temporarily used user id
100 on both sides, with the same user group 103.  That sorted out the write
problems I had initially, so the NFS now seems to be working right, 
but the httpd still doesn't save .html files in its cache.

If anyone's got a clue as to what's going on, I'd appreciate any tips.
I don't have to time to start digging into the httpd source at the moment.

TIA,

Raju
--
Raju M. Daryanani
Technical Manager           | Email: raju@rssd.hk.olivetti.com
Software & Network Services |        raju@hk.super.net, raju@air.org
Service Business Unit       | Tel: +852 2979 2450 / Fax: +852 2802 6650
Olivetti (HK) Ltd.          | [Finger for PGP key] [MIME understood]