I've been having an intermittent problem with user authentication over the last couple of months. For reasons I've yet to understand, users will all of a sudden not be able to authenticate (we're using ncsa_auth) to Squid despite providing valid credentials (confirmed with debug_options ALL,1 29,9) ; Squid will repeatedly prompt the user for authentication and ultimate deny access due to authentication failure. Basically, we have users directed to one of two proxy's (Solaris 8, Squid-2.5.STABLE10) via a proxy auto configuration file. We ftp out a password file (about 75K) to both proxy's which overwrites the active password file used by Squid. The problem appears to occur against each proxy simultaneously and so we had suspected a problem with the fact that we're overwriting the active password file (although we confirmed it is being ftp'ed out intact)but we've not been able to establish any correlation. Also, tried increasing auth_param basic children but to no avail. Ultimately, the symptoms 'go away' after a few minutes or alternatively we're able to stabilize things by bouncing squid issuing a 'squid -k reconfigure' ; interestingly after doing this we observe several 'Clearing cache ACL results for user: <username>' entries in cache.log where <username> matches the account name of a user actively experiencing the problem. Would appreciate any insights? Thank-you. Regards, Sergio Di Geronimo SIEMENS Siemens IT Solutions and Services
