Clearing Squid caches (RE: [plug] re; Network filtering)

[Matt Kemner]

On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Colin Rothnie wrote:

> Some things to watch for if using Custodian;
> - I don't think it prevents objects already in the cache from being served up.

Squid comes with a little program called "client" which can be used to
purge a URL from the cache - very useful when dealing with braindead
webservers (such as the National Bank's) that don't set
expiry/modification times on the pages it serves, so when they change
something, their admin asks all ISPs to clear their caches. *grumble*

You could use it in combination with Custodian (or the like) to prevent
cached pages being served up.

You can run it (assuming squid's on localhost) with eg:

client -p 8888 -m PURGE http://www.somewebsite.com/file/to/purge.html

You will also need your squid.conf set up with something like

acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255
acl PURGE method purge
http_access allow purge localhost
http_access deny purge

 - Matt