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varnishvarnish-vcl

Basic Varnish Configuration

I'm in the baby step stages of setting up Varnish for the first time and I think I must have some fundamental misunderstanding. For the purpose of testing, I've left /etc/default/varnish in its default config:

DAEMON_OPTS="-a :6081 \
             -T localhost:6082 \
             -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
             -S /etc/varnish/secret \
             -s malloc,256m"

My /etc/varnish/default.vcl has this content (my Nginx virtual host is still listening on port 80 for now):

backend default {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "80";
}

My Nginx server block contains this:

listen 80;

For good measure, netstat shows listeners on those key ports:

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:6081            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:6082          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN

As I understand it from reading a lot of posts on the topic, I should be able to open my.site.com:6081 in a browser to have traffic routed through Varnish to Nginx and back. I'm not seeing that. I get a connection error instead. At this point, I'm not trying to do anything sophisticated; I just want to establish communication and retrieve content.

I have no doubt this is a me issue and not a Varnish issue, but I don't see where I've gone wrong. I can't see any key difference between my ultra-basic config and what I've found online. Where have I gone wrong?

  • Ubuntu 12.04
  • Varnish 3.0.2
  • Nginx 1.1.19

Any remedial assistance would be much appreciated.

Solution

  • Looks like network problem.

    Do you have some kind of firewall protecting ports? Could you connect to Varnish locally from the server with 

    curl -I -H 'Host:my.site.com' http://localhost:6081/

    or

    telnet 127.0.0.1 6081