Death of a firewall
I have Squid and squidGuard installed on my home network. Squid is supposed to speed up the internet connection by caching pages that have been visited before and only checking the internet when new content is available. SquidGuard uses filtering to block sites for users on the network. As luck would have it, last night when attempting to check out a web page I started hearing a clunking sound from the firewall computer. I turned on the monitor and the worst diagnosis available was on the screen. Unable to access the hard drive.
As luck would have it, I had two hard drives in that machine and it was the second drive that was failing - or rather had failed. Since I have a box of old drives sitting around (thanks Steve) I was able to pull the drive from the machine, add a “new” one, partition it and format it. A quick reboot tests the drive and the addition to the file system.
Next on the the squids. They were in /usr/local/ - dead from the old drive. Nuts! A quick search on the file system shows that I left the source in the /builds directory. Whew! A simple make install puts squid and squidguard back where they belong. Now, how was that configured again? Check the squid page. Damn - I had transparent proxy set up… ok that means I have to change the redirection in the firewall rules - that was a simple comment out a line and restart the firewall script. Now, reread the configuration options online. Of course, further thought lights up my brain with a bright idea; save the configuration files on the main file system. Of course that means uninstalling, reconfiguring, remaking and reinstalling. Damn, there’s a newer version of squid-stable available. Uninstall, clean. Download the newer version. Configure, make, make install. Whew. So where was I? Oh yeah, runtime configuration… maybe I’ll take a break. There’s (more) Corona in the fridge. I guess I’ll get back to it later….
