Installing squid, where should the directories be?

[Kevin Wilcox]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 10:27, Leslie Jensen <leslie at eskk.nu> wrote:

> I'm installing squid on a new 8.2-RELEASE machine.

Me too.

> I have /usr/local/squid as default directory and has made a separate mount
> point.

Same here. As a general rule I like to give squid its own hard drive,
or its own RAID. Giving it a separate partition on a single drive is
useful if you're concerned about filling the disk but that *should* be
controlled by the squid configuration file. Still, it's a good idea.

> When it comes to the cache and the logs directory I can see that the squid
> installation has created the /var/squid/cache directory.

I've always seen /var/squid as being very "Linux-centric".

/usr/local/squid or /usr/local/var/squid makes more sense to me.

> When Googling this problem I see both the use of /var/squid and
> /usr/local/squid.

> Where should it be?

Yep, ultimately it doesn't matter as long as you know where it is, you
document where it is and your settings are correct in
/usr/local/etc/squid/squid.conf.

By default squid will use /var/squid. I always change it on install.

> When running the command squid -z to initialize the cache the cache
> directory must be there otherwise the command won't work.
>
> How should I set the permissions on /usr/local/squid and the directories
> below?

I use 755, squid:squid.

> I could not find any advise in the Handbook. I'll be happy to help making a
> squid chapter.

I'm writing some internal documentation on deploying pf + squid 2.7.x
+ SNMP on FreeBSD 8.2 routers/firewalls with cacti monitoring, I'll
contribute what I can. I doubt we'll see a section on squid as it's
really a niche area but it's always good to have something on the list
so folks doing a search can find something useful. If it's going to be
a few days before you get into the heavy lifting I'll try to send
something directly or maybe a link to this list this weekend.

You said you had notes from doing a 2.x installation, are you
installing 3.x? . I'm sticking with 2.7.STABLE9 for storeurl support
in some places and considering 3.x in others. 3.2 introduced SMP
support but you can achieve pseudo-SMP support by running multiple
instances on the same machine...just remember each instance has its
own RAM and disk cache, which sort of kills the performance.

kmw