creative.net.au: How to embed images inside Squid error pages

How to embed images inside a Squid error page

Here's the problem: You want to make your Squid web proxy error pages pretty. This isn't difficult; but you can't figure out how to embed images inside the Squid error pages which render. This is a surprisingly interesting problem to solve if the users are behind a firewall and must authenticate to the proxy before they can get access to the internet.

So, there's a few ways.

You can run a web server on another host/port and configure squid to not require authentication. This isn't difficult and would look like this:
```
	acl error_page_server dst 1.2.3.4 IP of the web server with images on it

	http_access allow error_page_server
	miss_access allow error_page_server
      
```
This may subtly break if you don't get your access control entries right for some reason.
Or you can do it the Adrian way!
- Squid can serve static content! But you abuse the "mime" type code which has gif images which it uses when rendering things like FTP lists.
- So, you just add the images to the icons directory..
- .. and then add this into mime.conf:
```
	  # uwa-internal stuff, for the error pages [ahc]
	  \.uwaicon1$     application/uwa-image-1         uwalogotrans.gif                -               image
	  \.uwaicon2$     application/uwa-image-2         wing.gif                        -               image
	  
```
- Finally, you can now reference the images directly: eg http://proxy.server:3128/squid-internal-static/icons/wing.gif