Squid-reverse

Sam0r

I think I'll just go back to using Forefront TMG.

As good as pfsense is, it does't work for me. I need something up and running, and with documentation, not something put together by people in their spare time with next to no documentation.

No offence to the community, it's a great work in progress, but its not for me.

thanks for your time.

jimp

@Sam0r:

I think I'll just go back to using Forefront TMG.

As good as pfsense is, it does't work for me. I need something up and running, and with documentation, not something put together by people in their spare time with next to no documentation.

No offence to the community, it's a great work in progress, but its not for me.

thanks for your time.

There are so many things wrong with that statement I don't know where to begin. But you are right, there is no one perfect solution for everyone, use whatever works best for you.

marcelloc

@jimp:

There are so many things wrong with that statement I don't know where to begin. But you are right, there is no one perfect solution for everyone, use whatever works best for you.

I second that.

pfSense works great to me.

dhatz

I think a big difference has to do with the scale of such setups:

iirc marcelloc is overseeing a large-scale setup (Exchange 2010 with tens of thousands of mailboxes), so he can probably justify spending many hours to intimately learn those different packages in order to integrate and properly test them.

Someone with a much smaller installation, say 100-200 users, may just want a reverse-proxy solution that "simply works" and offers commercial support, because he's probably busy with a dozen other IT-related subjects.

So, as jimp noted, there is no one perfect solution for everyone.

marcelloc

@dhatz:

I think a big difference has to do with the scale of such setups:

iirc marcelloc is overseeing a large-scale setup (Exchange 2010 with tens of thousands of mailboxes), so he can probably justify spending many hours to intimately learn those different packages in order to integrate and properly test them.

Someone with a much smaller installation, say 100-200 users, may just want a reverse-proxy solution that "simply works" and offers commercial support, because he's probably busy with a dozen other IT-related subjects.

So, as jimp noted, there is no one perfect solution for everyone.

You are 100% right.
All features that I needed in pfsense that was not part of it, I have published to help many others to reach same result with less effort.

Seeing Sam0r difficult on get a simple web proxy solution, maybe I can improve varnish package to require less configuration or dependencies for example.

jimp

maybe have a wizard to setup exchange forwarding in Varnish. Steps through and asks, host name, IP, etc.

No need to dumb down the whole GUI just find a way to make some common tasks easier.

marcelloc

@jimp:

maybe have a wizard to setup exchange forwarding in Varnish. Steps through and asks, host name, IP, etc.

No need to dumb down the whole GUI just find a way to make some common tasks easier.

great idea! :)

I'll try it when I finish dansguardian.

Hobby-Student

Hey guys,

I'm very new to pfSense, but I like the box and packages :)

EDIT #2:
Sorry… My fault. haven't seen it... squid.inc.. now it works like a charm :) I really like this box

I also use squid as reverse-proxy to get access to OWA and ActiveSync. My main problem is, that I had to manually edit the .conf, because I need more than one https port. Everything is working great, until I reboot pfSense…

What I found in the forum is, that this seems to be a general problem. But how can I fix it?! I already added "-f /path/to/my/conf.conf" to the startup script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/squid.sh, but this won't work. Squid startsup with the "empty" config in /usr/local/etc/squid.

Could someone please point me to the right direction, so the config will survive a reboot of pf Sense?

Thanks in advance

EDIT:
pfSense 2.0.1 release and squid 2.7.9_2

Sam0r

It's just the lack of documentation that frustrates me.

If the documentation had said "To forward the root directory of a website, insert a * in the URI." That would've saved me weeks.

If I had weeks to spend on this I would, because I like what you guys do, we use untangle in some setups, because the OpenVPN works a treat. Others we use pfsense where we need a simple gateway, and in our enterprise setups we use TMG.

I desperately wanted to prove that I could use pfsense in an enterprise rig, but I don't have the time to do it myself, or the funding to pay someone else to do it.

Like i said, its the documentation that always falls sort when it comes to open source software, this isn't just a dig at pfsense, most open source software has this issue. It's easy to see why, documenting things is the boring bit. But to be successful it needs to be done.

jimp

The base system is fairly well documented, but some packages lack it here and there. Squid-reverse (and varnish) are relatively new, and they are packages, so they tend to be less documented than the base system itself.

Cino

When I was testing varnish on my box.. I was confused and varnish's website was really no help but I posted questions on the forum. Marcelloc replied within hours to help me out.. Took a couple of days but he helped me out and made changes to the package as we found road blocks.

marcelloc

Something That helped me a lot during package devel was "googling" for recomended setup, tutorial as well documentation.

Varnish itself is difficult to setup, gui helps But you still need to know about varnish.

Sorry for the poor documentation. I alway try to include hints and link to documentation. I'm not That good on tutorials.

If you still want to try varnish, use forum to post questions. I'll do my best to help you.

Hobby-Student

Heyho,

thanks for this great package!

If needed, I could help extending the gui setup of squid-reverse to support more options of squid…?!

meese7en

Dear all,

I have managed to setting squid-reverse properly. It works for two domain to 2 webservers.
How can I manage to get all other domain to go to one server without having to list all the domains in the setting?

trendchiller

@Sam0r:

Actually I've just realised a day after getting it working that it doesn't support Exchange 2010 Web Services, this makes the package totally useless for me.

publishing /EWS* does not help…
any ints ?

trendchiller

@Hobby-Student:

If needed, I could help extending the gui setup of squid-reverse to support more options of squid…?!

you're welcome ;)

trendchiller

@trendchiller:

@Sam0r:

Actually I've just realised a day after getting it working that it doesn't support Exchange 2010 Web Services, this makes the package totally useless for me.

publishing /EWS* does not help…
any ints ?

next version will support EWS :)

danno

Im having abit of a problem.

I want all subdomains for one domain going to one ip. And another much like it but a different domain.
And let the target server handle subdomains.

Much like pseudo config below;

HOST1;192.168.1.1;80;HTTP
HOST2;192.168.1.2;80;HTTP

WEBAPP1;;http://.domainname1.com
WEBAPP2;;http://.domainname2.com

HOST1;WEBAPP1
HOST2;WEBAPP2

Meaning all requests to a.domainname1.com and b.domainname1.com goes to HOST1. And c.domainname2.com, d.domainname2.com goes to HOST2.

How can i do above scenario? im having no luck ;( getting alot of squid access control problems

danno

@danno:

Im having abit of a problem.

I want all subdomains for one domain going to one ip. And another much like it but a different domain.
And let the target server handle subdomains.

Much like pseudo config below;

HOST1;192.168.1.1;80;HTTP
HOST2;192.168.1.2;80;HTTP

WEBAPP1;;http://.domainname1.com
WEBAPP2;;http://.domainname2.com

HOST1;WEBAPP1
HOST2;WEBAPP2

Meaning all requests to a.domainname1.com and b.domainname1.com goes to HOST1. And c.domainname2.com, d.domainname2.com goes to HOST2.

How can i do above scenario? im having no luck ;( getting alot of squid access control problems

To answer my own question;
It's not harder then adding another "." infront of the "*" like this;

WEBAPP1;;http://**..**domainname1.com

danno

Hi again!

Another problem, this time with basic auth. For some reason its turned off with squid.

See this info;

If the content on the web servers is password protected then you need to tell the proxy to trust your web server with authentication credentials. This is done via the login= option to cache_peer. Normally you would use login=PASS to have the login information forwarded. The other alternatives is meant to be used when it's the reverse proxy which processes the authentication as such but you like to have information about the authenticated account forwarded to the backend web server.

From http://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/ReverseProxy

Basically "login=PASS" flag is needed in the conf file(/usr/local/etc/squid/squid.conf)

cache_peer 10.168.5.13 parent 80 0 proxy-only no-query login=PASS originserver name=MYHOST1

I tried edit the confi file and restart(/usr/local/etc/rc.d/squid restart) and my basic auth on webpage starteed working again.

We need a flag in the UI for this, editing the conf file manually it not a good idea.