[squid-users] "FATAL: Cannot open 'on' for writing." Solution for anyone having this problem.

I just upgraded on FC9, 2.6.26.6-79.fc9.i686 to
squid-3.0.STABLE10-1.fc9.i386 this very morning (can't remember what
version it was from - just whatever went before I suppose). Once I'd
done this, Squid refused to start, throwing up with a:

FATAL: Cannot open 'on' for writing.
        The parent directory must be writeable by the
        user 'squid', which is the cache_effective_user
        set in squid.conf.

I found various references to this but no solutions apart from one
person who said the issue was resolved after deleting and re-creating
the cache and then upgrading to the latest version. I was already
current and re-creating the cache did nothing.

After an hour of staff and students realising how truly dull computers
are without the Internet, I sussed it out. A grep -v
'^#' /etc/squid/squid.conf | egrep 'on' showed the lines in squid.conf
which weren't commented out and also had 'on' in them. This got me to
try commenting these options out.

After some monkeying around I found that I needed to chop both of these
out to make the current Squid talk to me again:

referer_log on
useragent_log on

I also have 'emulate_httpd_log on' set but I didn't need to remove that
though it may be relevant.

Anyhow, I'm sure a few people will run into this so hopefully it'll help
someone.

C.
Received on Mon Dec 01 2008 - 11:24:07 MST