Fix SARG Reports in pfsense

SARG Reports are a good compliment to Squid Proxy and since there is a package that is available for installation in pfsense, it makes good sense to setup SARG Reports. The downsides to SARG Reports is that the reports do take up space and over time this can be significant. This posting is about a problem I encountered on pfsense 2.1 and the latest SARG package.

For some unknown reason the reports stopped generating. Upon checking my System Log this is the issue I found:

php: /pkg_edit.php: The command 'export LC_ALL=C && /usr/pbi/sarg-amd64/bin/sarg -d `date +%d/%m/%Y`-`date +%d/%m/%Y`' returned exit code '1', 
the output was 'SARG: Cannot get the modification time of input log file /var/log/squid/access.log (No such file or directory). Processing it anyway SARG: File not found: /var/log/squid/access.log'

I am using the 64-bit version of pfsense, so hence the sarg-amd64. If you are using 32-bit, it will state instead sarg-i386.

The solution is to edit the sarg.conf file that is located in one of these locations, depending on your pfsense build:

/usr/pbi/sarg-amd64/etc/sarg/sarg.conf
/usr/pbi/sarg-i386/etc/sarg/sarg.conf

You will need to verify that the access_log line is correct:

#access_log /usr/local/squid/var/logs/access.log

In my case, removing the # sign and specifying the correct path to my Squid access.log corrected the problem.

If you have issues with SARG Reports, it is best to do the following:

1. Under the Status Menu – click SARG Reports.
2. On the General tab click Save
3. Next click on the Users tab and click Save
4. Click Schedule and create your schedule or if you have one already open it up and click Save.
5. You can go back to the Schedule and Force Update to see if SARG Reports are working now.

I also schedule SARG Reports in Cron to run at 11:50pm every night instead of midnight.

50  23  */1  *  *