Saturday, April 16th, 2005
I recently finished up a project where I hit a roadblock for a few days. Part of the project was supplying the end user with a deny page that squid generated, plus some of my own code to enable a user to login. The problem? After the user logged in they were greeted with the same deny page if they tried to access a URL that previously generated the deny page.
Example: You browse to www.yahoo.com and get our login page. You login to our system and then continue to browse. But if you try and hit www.yahoo.com you will get the same login page. It’s being cached somewhere.
I was already setting the appropriate meta tags to tell squid not to cache the page, and verified that the document was not in the squid cache. Squid generates error pages not as http 200′s but as 403′s. That’s fine, but what’s different is that squid caches http errors (404′s, 403′s, etc) in memory for a customizable period of time, defaulting to 5 minutes.
Squid has a command to customize this: negative_ttl. If your customer is coming across the network from an external_acl you’ll need to add the negative_ttl option to it as well.
Just FYI.
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
Look who’s down my street…
Article here.
Tuesday, February 15th, 2005
I just had the displeasure of using Eudora 6.2.1 to trouble-shoot something at work. Upon Eudora downloading new mail messages the user is greeted with noise reminiscent of Commander Keen, and a picture of 3 sheep. Does anyone still use this crap?
Thursday, January 6th, 2005
Some technical items I would like to accomplish in the year 2005.
- Purchase of G5 Powermac (after macworld)
- Migrate 4 email clients/accounts into one (I wonder if Mail.app can handle 1200 messages a day…). I will miss you pine.
- Make VoIP stable. This means setting up QOS that works and maybe running ethernet to my server rack in the garage instead of wireless.
- Create a captive portal for my wireless network at the house.
There are of course many more items that I will accomplish this year, these are my personal forecasted ones though.
Friday, December 31st, 2004
Title might be a bit misleading. Some of these applications have been around longer than just this past year; but they are new to me this year. They helped me get a great deal of work done.
Continued reading >