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I run Squid in accelerator mode — i.e. all http requests go through a Squid cache before being forwarded to Apache. This noticeably speeds up Wordpress on my puny virtual server. So today apt-get told me that a new version of Squid was out, and I blissfully upgraded from 2.5 to 2.6. An hour later I realized that my website was down. Restarting Squid yielded the error message
Restarting Squid HTTP proxy: squid2006/07/26 21:45:11| parseConfigFile: line 2218 unrecognized: 'httpd_accel_host virtual'

Some googling revealed the answer: Squid 2.6 uses a very different syntax for specifying accelerator mode. Now, how hard would it have been for Squid or Debian to warn me that the config file syntax was going to change? Or at least update the Squid FAQ to reflect the new syntax? I am sure there are quite a few people using the accelerator feature…

For the record, if your Squid forwards to Apache sitting on port 81 on the same machine, i.e. if your version 2.5 squid.conf setup looked like
http_port 80
httpd_accel_host virtual
httpd_accel_port 81

you will need to change it to something like
http_port 80 vhost
cache_peer 127.0.0.1 parent 81 0 no-query originserver
(and if you are starting off with a virgin 2.6 copy of squid.conf, don’t forget to configure your acls and http_access entries properly).

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 0:29 and is filed under tech reference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.