5.9 Reconfiguring a Running Squid Process

As you learn more about Squid, you'll probably find yourself making many changes to the squid.conf file. To have the new settings take effect, you can either shut down and restart Squid, or you can reconfigure Squid while it is running.

The best way to reconfigure a running Squid process is with the squid -k reconfigure command:

 % squid -k reconfigure 

When you run this command, a HUP signal is sent to the running Squid process. Squid then reads and parses the squid.conf file. If the operation is successful, you'll see this in cache.log :

 2003/09/29 22:02:25 Restarting Squid Cache (version 2.5.STABLE4)... 2003/09/29 22:02:25 FD 12 Closing HTTP connection 2003/09/29 22:02:25 FD 13 Closing ICP connection 2003/09/29 22:02:25 Cache dir '/usr/local/squid/var/cache' size remains unchanged                      at 102400 KB 2003/09/29 22:02:25 DNS Socket created on FD 5 2003/09/29 22:02:25 Adding nameserver 10.0.0.1 from /etc/resolv.conf 2003/09/29 22:02:25 Accepting HTTP connections at 0.0.0.0, port 3128, FD 9. 2003/09/29 22:02:25 Accepting ICP messages at 0.0.0.0, port 3130, FD 11. 2003/09/29 22:02:25 WCCP Disabled. 2003/09/29 22:02:25 Loaded Icons. 2003/09/29 22:02:25 Ready to serve requests. 

You need to be a little careful with the reconfigure option because it's possible to make changes that cause a fatal error. For example, note that Squid closes and reopens the incoming HTTP and ICP sockets. If you change the http_port to a port number that Squid can't open , it exits with a fatal error message.

Certain options and directives can't be changed while Squid is running. This includes:

• Removal of cache directories ( cache_dir directive).

• Changes to the store_log directive.

• Changing the block-size value for coss cache_dir s. In fact, whenever you change this value, you must reinitialize the coss cache_dir .

• The coredump_dir directive isn't examined during the reconfigure procedure. Thus, you can't make Squid change its current directory after it has started.

Solaris users may experience a subtle problem when reconfiguring Squid. The fopen( ) call in the Solaris stdio implementation requires an unused file descriptor less than 256. The FILE structure stores the file descriptor as an 8-bit value. Normally this isn't a problem because Squid uses raw I/O (e.g., open( ) ) to open cache files. However, certain tasks that occur during the reconfigure procedure use fopen( ) . These may fail if the first 256 file descriptors are already allocated.