Re: LYNX-DEV caching & \ (was 2.7.2 report)

[David Woolley]

> 
> Would someone happen to have the time to write up a complete "howto" on how
> to set up a private cache?  It might stop this oft repeated request.  Lots of
> people are using Lynx within the confines of their own account.  How can these

If they are using it under their own account, they should be campaigning for
a site cache, as that will bring much better benefits than an account cache.
I've only set up the CERN cache as root so far.

> non-sysadmins set up external cacheing themselves? Honestly, I've been wanting
> to do this for ages, but just never seem to get enough time to do the 
> research.

However, in proxy mode, the CERN server runs up with no changes to the
demo configuration file, although, given you'd have to share TCP port
space, you should probably change the port number.  Anyway, lets try
for a cache:

My home directory is /home/david.  The system is linux (2.0.30 kernel, 
Slackware 3.1).

Build the server.
mkdir /home/david/.w3ccache
Copy caching.conf from the server_root/config directory in the distribution
to .w3ccache.
Make changes comparable to the following (user and group probably don't
matter as it won't have the privilege to set them and seems to ignore
failures):

--- /usr/src/cern-httpd-3.0/server_root/config/caching.conf     Sun Jan 28 
22:05:46 1996
+++ caching.conf        Sun Apr  5 21:22:23 1998
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
 #      Set this to point to the directory where you unpacked this
 #      distribution, or wherever you want httpd to have its "home"
 #
-ServerRoot     /where/ever/server_root
+ServerRoot     /home/david/.w3ccache
 
 #
 #      Set the port for proxy to listen to
@@ -26,8 +26,8 @@
 #      General setup; on some systems, like HP, nobody is defined so
 #      that setuid() fails; in those cases use a different user id.
 #
-UserId nobody
-GroupId        nogroup
+UserId david
+GroupId        david
 
 #
 #      Logging; if you want logging uncomment these lines and specify
@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@
 #      in megabytes
 #
 Caching                On
-CacheRoot      /your/cache/root/dir
+CacheRoot      /home/david/.w3ccache/cache
 CacheSize      5
 
 #

mkdir /home/david/.w3ccache/cache

run "httpd -r /home/david/.w3ccache/caching.conf

and you are in business.

Notes: 
  - don't forget to kill it when you are finished - it daemonises (you
    might be able to avoid that by putting it debug mode);
  - randomise the port number to avoid conflicts with others doing the
    same thing;
  - more configuration might be needed for garbage collection to work,
    but you can generally delete anything except the top level cache
    directory;
  - you should probably add access controls;
  - you should almost certainly use lynx type proxy environment variables
    (both use the CERN library) or HTTP_proxy, etc., directives in the config
    file to reference an upstream proxy;
  - you should use version 3.0A, from W3C (w3c-httpd-3.0A.tar.gz) not the
    the 3.0 version I happened to have ready built;
  - squid or Apache are more modern and will support HTTP/1.1 features to 
    some extent, but I've not tried using them myself (CERN generally works
    in the office, and I'd have to rework the access controls if I changed).