On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:29:03 +0000, Andrew Beverley wrote:
On Sun, 2011-11-06 at 14:17 +1300, Amos Jeffries wrote:
On 6/11/2011 1:39 p.m., Andrew Beverley wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am using the ACL feature whereby the parameters can be read from
a
> file. For example:
>
> acl session_day time "/var/www/announce_days.txt"
>
> Understandably, the file only appears to be read when the
configuration
> file is parsed, rather than each time the ACL is checked. However,
I
> need it to be checked more often, as I have a system configuration
> interface that writes a day of the week to the file, which
subsequently
> causes a splash page to be shown on a particular day. I would like
> configuration to be done without having to reload the Squid
> configuration file.
>
> Would any consideration be given to a patch to check the ACL file
more
> often? Could/should it be an extra configuration option to check
the
> file each request? I appreciate that this would come with a
greater
> overhead. Is there a better way to achieve this?
A better way currently available would be to use an external_acl
helper
to read and response OK/FAIL. You probably want to pass something
relatively static (%PROTO or %METHOD) as the ACL format to reduce
the
overheads. With time calculations vs "now" you can ignore the actual
input format.
Good idea, thanks. I've now written a little perl helper to do this.
It would be nice to add this to the main squid source code. Shall I
just
submit as a bzr diff as normal? Is there any documentation for the
external helpers that I should also add to?
Well, in light of the facts that new helpers are only being added to
3.3 now and that live re-configuration via POST to the manager is very
close now I'm not sure how much use this would be.
On a similar subject, is there any mileage in making the FORMAT
optional
for external_acl_type? There is obviously no need for it in this
case,
although as you have shown it is easy to workaround with a fairly
static
parameter.
The long term plans are to make the external ACL format merge with log
line format codes and add a format= option. Allowing far more
flexibility in the format syntax.
I've just added support for the '%%' token which can be used for a
completely static placeholder.
Amos
