On 3/02/2013 7:02 p.m., Matthew Goff wrote:
Ah...But is it floating on the web to be found by Google? ;) I
searched off and on a little for a way to easily tie Squid to MySQL
and I found lots of people asking but very little practical examples
beyond user authentication using the supplied demo script.
I'm curious how much caching would really be necessary in the helper
program though given that Squid already caches external ACL lookup
results on its own. I haven't seen any slowdown using this on my own
LAN, but that's a fairly small traffic sample.
My end goal was something using as few external library dependencies
as possible in a compiled language, so I can say I achieved that at
least. I really was just tired of the whole process of: ssh, su, edit,
reload, test -- each time I needed to block a new domain one of my
kids stumbled on ;) The SQL tie-in is also nice because it can be
managed by so many different tools so you can create portal pages or
small GUI tools to allow less technical users to update their lists
without worrying about what file on disk to edit and what commands to
run afterwards.
Every solution will have pros and cons, just have to pick the best one
for your own use case :)
You can also trivially alter the Basic authentication DB helper bundled
with Squid to do custom SQL queries. In fact this is the common solution
for external ACL helpers accessing a database.
The problem with external ACL helpers (and why we don't bundle many with
Squid) is that in just about all instances they are custom-written to
connect with some network-specific database or backend using some unique
sequence of format parameters, or processing to interpret the traffic state.
Amos
