[squid-users] url_regex to ban sites problem

I am blocking popular e-mail, chat and game sites from our users, like
hotmail. (I know, I am a BOFH)

It works, but too well. I find users cannot do things like search
"hotmail.com" in Google or e-mail to their hotmail.com accounts from sites
that have "e-mail this article to yourself" links. This is because Squid
sees the hotmail.com in the URL.

So I changed the entry in my banned_sites.txt file
from:

hotmail.com

to:

^http://hotmail.com$

and did squid -k reconfigure.

But they still have the problem with hotmail.com anywhere in the URL.

Any suggestions? Am I doing my regex wrong?

in squid.conf:

acl banned_sites url_regex -i "/usr/local/squid/etc/banned_sites.txt"
http_access deny banned_sites
deny_info sorry.htm banned_sites

Steve Hunt
hunt_steve@smc.edu
Received on Thu Oct 25 2001 - 12:45:24 MDT