[squid-users] FATAL: Could not determine fully qualified hostname. Please set 'visible_hostname'

weird!!

i didn't get this error message AT ALL before today. here is the full message.
[root@squid1 squid]# /etc/rc.d/init.d/squid status
squid dead but subsys locked
FATAL: Could not determine fully qualified hostname. Please set 'visible_hostname'

Squid Cache (Version 2.5.DEVEL): Terminated abnormally.
CPU Usage: 0.020 seconds = 0.020 user + 0.000 sys
Maximum Resident Size: 0 KB
Page faults with physical i/o: 359

the machine is dual homed... /var/log/messages complains that squid cannot determine the fully qualified hostname.

1- why would the error message come up?
2- is it enough to provide a "visible_hostname squidproxy.mydomain.com" in the squid.conf file?

i read into the squid.conf.default file where it talked about visible_hostname and unique_hostname. my current config is a transparent reverse proxy (proxying for multiple back-end machines). when the client uses DNS to resolve squidproxy.mydomain.com (which uses a load balancer to determine whether it goes to squid1 or squid2) it hits one of the two boxes, then each box looks in /etc/hosts for where the internal ip of squidproxy.mydomain.com is located.

from the default squid.conf file it doesn't seem as though defining a visible_hostname would do any harm since it says that it is used to specify a hostname in error messages to clients. but since i have "multiple machines with the same ''visible_hostname' then you must give each machine a different 'unique_hostname' so that forwarding loops can be detected."

so
3 - do i have to define "unique_hostname squid1.mydomain.com" for squid1 and "unique_hostname squid2.mydomain.com for squid2 ?

john
Received on Mon Mar 19 2001 - 20:43:38 MST