Thursday, 15 January 2015

Squid failing to fetch IPv6 web resources and dns_v4_first

I had a strange symptom on my Chromebook on my home LAN. A particular Internet web page would not work because a jQuery file distributed by cdnjs.cloudflare.com could not be fetched. When I disabled the use of a proxy in my Chromebook, the web page worked. I have a squid caching proxy on my LAN, partly to be able to zap advertisments. So I knew it had something to do with squid.

Maybe it was a bad object in the cache? I knew there was a way to delete cached objects from the command line, and a search showed me that all I had to do was add these lines to /etc/squid/squid.conf:

acl purge method PURGE

http_access deny purge !localhost

and then use the command:

squidclient -m PURGE https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/blah.js

to remove it. However when I ran

squidclient https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/blah.js

to fetch it again, I saw that squid was trying to use the IPv6 address of cdnjs.cloudflare.com to get the resource and failing.

My LAN is fully IPv6 enabled because my Linux machines all support the IPv6 stack, I have a BIND server giving out IPv6 addresses, and in fact a lot of the internal traffic such as Apache goes over IPv6 transparently. I wish I had an IPv6 broadband connection but I don't so I cannot use IPv6 addresses in the outside world.

So the problem boiled down to: how can I prevent squid from trying to reach IPv6 sites. It turns out that the directive dns_v4_first is intended for this. Just adding:

dns_v4_first on

to /etc/squid/squid.conf worked and now I can view that Internet web page.

One symptom remained unexplained though, why didn't the Chrome browser on the host running squid suffer the same problem? I can only surmise that it's because in that case the proxy is specified as an IPv4 address and port so squid thinks, the request is coming in from a IPv4 host so I'll forward this request to an IPv4 origin. The Chromebook however, sends the request to the (internal) IPv6 address of squid so squid thinks it's allowed to forward the request to an IPv6 origin.

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