I have a production squid proxy that I am about to decommission soon. The proxy has about 400 users mainly at remote location. We have purchased a new proxy appliance and it is ready for use.
At this point of time, I can customize an error page with details on how to configure proxy settings and then disable access to all site so that these users can see this error page. But I prefer not to as the users would probably get confused and helpdesk will be flooded with calls.
I am thinking of displaying a reminder to the proxy users on the cut off date and instructions on how to configure proxy setting on their PC and they would need to click on a button to resume browsing.
Is there anyway I can achieve this with Squid Proxy? The proxy operates on a CentOS with Apache installed.
Best Answer
Squid supports custom error pages, take advantage of this.
In a directory (just use the default one,
/usr/share/squid/errors
on my system), create your info page without any extension (for example/usr/share/squid/errors/MY_CUSTOM_INFO_PAGE
), then in Squid's config create an ACL that will match all the requests you want to redirect to the info page, deny access for that ACL and use thedeny_info
directive to serve that custom page :You can also specify an URL to which the users will be redirected, just make sure that URL does not trigger the deny ACL, otherwise you'll create a redirect loop that can potentially DoS your server :
Note that when using a custom error page (not an URL) you'll need to set the
error_directory
directive as well, unless you're ready to translate your error page in each one of the languages stored in the error page directory :