Hello Mukund,
Have faced this problem a while back when I was working on an accounting
software which extracts user activity based on squid / sendmail logs.

Its difficult to put a fix on when the user logged in / logged out, but
there are several work arounds which you'll can customise. I don
remember the exact options we considered but here are a few - 

- Whenever a user is authenticated, squid puts a Denied entry in the
log, signifying that the access was denied because the user was not
authenticated. The Squid http style log would show you the username
involved too. This can be taken as the login time.

- Put an authentication timeout in squid so that the user authenticates
after that time and you get another Denied entry in the log file.

- Parse the log file with a timeout, i.e. parse the log entries finding
out the time difference between every log entry. If the difference in
any two log entries is more than, say 5 mins, then take the first entry
as the logout time and the next one as the next login. This is cruddy
and very inaccurate, but it works.

- Write a small application which runs on the client side. The user
specifies his user / password to the app, the app connects to the server
which is running another small app which takes this login / pass, adds
the client's IP to the allowed IP's acl and runs squid -k reconfigure
and if you want, update your accounting entries from here directly. When
the client program exits, remove the client IP from the allowed acl's
and mark a user logout. This is cruddy too, but if implemented well,
would work perfectly.

For us, things got more interesting when we were required to generate
the accounting data in real time (e.g. for a cybercafe) for which we had
to parse the squid log file in real time. Don ask me how we managed to
do that. It was cruddy! ;-)

Its been long that I worked to find a solution for this particular
problem, maybe something better is available at the squid authentication
level. Dunno about that. Check once before opting for any of the above.

HTH.

VaibhaV

On Wed, 2001-12-26 at 07:00, mukund wrote:
> I have successfully tested user login (via /etc/passwd)  in squid. However I
> did not find any logs when user logs out of squid.
> I want to calculate for time period for which the user was logged to squid.
> 
> Regards,
> Mukund Deshmukh



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