[squid-users] Can't create swap space

Hi!

My name is Thomas Bitschnau and I am doing a work on squid for my
studies at the moment.
The first step in this work is to get squid to work. I am using "Squid -
The definitive guide" released by O'Reilly to manage this.

I created a user "squid" and a group "squid" on my home machine (Fedora
Linux Core 3). I changed permission on my */squid/var/ directory to the
former written user, as you can see below:

root@BearKnuckle:/home/thomas/squid# ls -la var/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Dec 21 12:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Dec 21 12:06 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 squid squid 4096 Dec 21 10:13 cache
drwxr-xr-x 2 squid squid 4096 Dec 15 14:54 logs

If I try to create the cache using "squid -zX" as root, this is (a part)
of the output:

2004/12/21 12:35:48| leave_suid: PID 5113 called
2004/12/21 12:35:48| leave_suid: PID 5113 giving up root, becoming
'squid'
2004/12/21 12:35:48| Creating Swap Directories
2004/12/21 12:35:48| Creating swap space in /home/thomas/squid/var/cache
FATAL: Failed to make swap directory /home/thomas/squid/var/cache: (13)
Permission denied
Squid Cache (Version 2.5.STABLE7): Terminated abnormally.

I located the squid installation at /usr/local/squid, but the cache and
the config location in my home directory.

In squid.conf "cache_effective_user" is set to "squid".

I am at one's wits' end now and don't know what to try any further.

Regards,

Thomas B.