[KLUG Members] squid on ipcop

[Manu C S]

Hi,

I'm using squid 2.4-stable6 on ipcop 1.3
as my firewall and proxy in my college lab.
My switched network has about 120 systems running Windows 2K/XP

In my proxy, I'm trying to make time based access control
to IMs like yahoo and msn. This time restriction is only 
for students; staff & admin have unrestricted access.

My proxy configuration works fine for staff & admin.
(I make the distinction based on ip addresses and acl classes)
But for students, there is a problem.
When I log in to a student's machine as an administrator,
I can use the chat services perfectly. However, when I log in
as a student, I'm unable to connect to the messenger servers.

When I use yahoo messenger (v5.6), it immediately gives me
a message saying 'not connected'. I used ethereal to sniff 
the traffic and found that yahoo messenger wasn't even contacting
the gateway on which my proxy resides.
(Of course, my proxy settings on the messenger are correct.)

When I use msn messenger (v6.0), it eventually times out.
But again with ethereal I found that the msn client was actually
contacting the proxy. The proxy was sending back a html error 
page saying 'cache access denied' because authentication wasn't 
okay. But the window asking me for proxy authentication wasn't 
popped up at all.

All other web accesses to all sites via the proxy
work fine even for students. The only problem is with the IMs.
Does anyone have a clue?

Another thing is that, out of 90 machines allotted to students,
my proxy works perfectly on 2 machines for IM even for 
student logins.

I posted this question on squid-users mailing list and got 
them to check my squid.conf file. They said my configuration 
was okay, but I'd have to upgrade to squid 2.5 stable.

The problem is that squid2.5 uses glibc2.3 which ipcop
doesn't support. Any ideas how to get the latest squid on ipcop?
(I've asked this on the ipcop list too, but no responses yet.)

Any help is appreciated as it's been more than 20 days since
I've been struggling with this IM problem!

(If anyone's interested in checking my squid.conf file,
 please let me know & I'll email a copy to you.)

Regards,
Manu