Thanks for the suggestion. I'm sure ufdbguard works great even though it's not maintained/updated on my distro (Gentoo). I use ready-made helpers/redirectors like squidGuard on other systems. However, on this system I wanted to avoid depending on extra software. I also wanted to make my own helper so I could then combine Squid ACLs and do things such as: - block access to blacklisted URLs on a Squid setup with transparent ssl_bump (no proxy auth) - show custom deny web page with optional auth form to bypass this restriction - authenticate via LDAP using a custom web form, and insert the user's client IP address into a database with a timeout - auto-redirect the request to the restricted web site so the user on a particular client host can access the site for a given time frame - use a squid ACL to look up the user's host IP address in the DB, and decide to allow or not In any case, I've been experiencing lots of issues with Squid during the past 2 weeks. I can finally say that I've fine-tuned my setup thanks to the great help I found on this ML. One of the things that were nagging me was the helper part. Knowing how helpers work, and how they can be optimized on heavy traffic loads is "a good thing". For starters, I did not know how to use the concurrency option and how the use of it could benefit overall performance. Thanks, Vieri _______________________________________________ squid-users mailing list squid-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.squid-cache.org/listinfo/squid-users