Web Proxy - Pinger on by default?

[aUser]

Hi all,

I'll preface this by saying I'm not a Squid/pf expert, so happy to be corrected and educated.

• Is pinger in the squid package is on by default?
• Isn't pinger only really useful to configurations where the proxy is acting as a parent/peer?
• Is there a way to disable pinger?

I ask because I was trolling through my firewall logs and could not figure out why the firewall was sending echo requests only on WAN side from the "let out anything from firewall host itself" rule. These were going to most sites being visited, and I was surprised to see the domain names of the sites that were being visited in the ping packet data.

A bit of searching led me to pinger being responsible. I could not find a way to disable this in GUI so experimented by editing the squid.conf (adding 'pinger_enable off'). This did as expected and stopped the pings, but is obviously not a solution.

Am I missing something here in the configuration, or the way pinger works? I'm not using a parent proxy so in my (admittedly basic) understanding, this fits my firewall policy of 'if it's not required, turn it off'.

[Fright]

it looks like you're right.
pinger works (and squid starts quite a lot 'pingers') by default and there is no option in GUI\template to turn this off.
imho it is worth raising FR on github to make pinger switchable

[aUser]

PR done, toggle is in the 20.7.5 patch 

[Fright]

nice work!