Hi, I'm trying to get squid (ver 2.6.STABLE4) setup on a RHEL4 environment. I'm trying to get the squid setup to act as a transparent proxy, using NTLM to log active-directory usernames. When I initalise the squid cache (/usr/sbin/squid -z) everything works ok, but when I get to starting up the squid program (/usr/sbin/squid) I'm getting a number of warnings about the basicauthenticator helper.. (squid): The basicauthenticator helpers are crashing too rapidly, need help! squid[7978]: Squid Parent: child process 8112 exited due to signal 6 squid[7978]: Exiting due to repeated, frequent failures my first thought was to check the cache.log and got the following: helperStatefulOpenServers: Starting 15 'ntlm_auth' processes helperOpenServers: Starting 15 'ntlm_auth' processes Usage: (ntlm_auth) [OPTION...] which indicates that I've got my squid conf wrong...my squid.conf looks like this auth_param ntlm program /usr/bin/ntlm_auth --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp auth_param ntlm children 15 auth_param ntlm keep_alive on auth_param basic program /usr/bin/ntlm_auth auth_param basic children 15 auth_param basic realm Squid proxy-caching web server auth_param basic credentialsttl 2 hours auth_param basic casesensitive off the problem I believe is down to the syntax of my ntlm_auth command. I tried testing the ntlm_auth program directly (/usr/bin/ntlm_auth) to see if I could find the problem.. I get the following back: ./ntlm_auth --helper-protocol username must be specified! I'm not sure what information I have to pass into the "./ntlm_auth --helper-protocol..." line. My thoughts were that "--helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp" bit is wrong, but I'm not sure what to put in... any assistance would be gratefully appreciated. I have the samba side working ok, I have no problems in getting the groups or user information from AD using "wbinfo" calls.. thanks in advance PD ./ntlm_auth --helper-protocol username must be specified!