Re: Redundancy

Dear Dancer,

        Because of this I'm so happy with the Automatic Proxy configuration
facility of Netscape and Microsoft Internet explorer.. You can deal with
the failure of a proxy in the APC (a javascript)...

Cheers, Henny

>
> Lately, I've been encountering a loss-of-confidence in the proxying
> system whenever it becomes unavailable for any reason. Such reasons
> include: System maintenance, the short delay while doing a '-k
> reconfigure', log rotation, and the periodic shutdown (to tidy up memory
> usage)..not to mention the occasional fault that causes the box to
> become unavailable (particularly infrequent, but such things _do_
> happen).
>
> These things cause all manner of griping, but more importantly, it
> causes people to clear their proxy configurations, and bypass the
> system. Now, we don't want to _force_ people to use them, because
> occasionally you come across an object that just doesn't load properly
> through a proxy (often these have some kind of security doodad that
> looks back at the source-ip), and we don't want to unduly restrict the
> users in this regard. However, any kind of interruption of service
> causes the users to clear their browser's proxy settings, and they don't
> remember to put them back later.
>
> I thought about that a _lot_ this afternoon, and sat down and wrote some
> code. The end-result is 'sparent 1.1'. It accepts connections. It
> doesn't fork. It uses less than 30K of memory, and can be configured as
> a sole parent for squid (it only listens to localhost). When it gets a
> connection, it tries to forward it to (in turn) each of (up to) five
> parents. If a connection succeeds, sparent will forward the connection
> traffic through it. If all of them fail, it returns a (somewhat)
> customisable HTTP/1.0 error message, and sends an email to the
> configured administrator, telling them that the link is down (I found it
> a handy feature). Since it's dumb forwarding between connections, it
> doesn't care if they're persistant or not. It's happy with either.
>
> It's evil. It's scummy. It's beta. It has no real documentation. Just a
> small source file, and a sample config. It also works, within the limits
> of my testing. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll bounce a copy
> of it out to you.
>
> TODO:
> Give connection failure some smarts so that it doesn't email you _every_
> time someone tries to connect and everything's unreachable.
> Find bugs.
> Fix bugs.
>
> D
>
> --
> Note to evil sorcerers and mad scientists: don't ever, ever summon
> powerful
> demons or rip holes in the fabric of space and time. It's never a good
> idea.
> ICQ UIN: 3225440
>
>
>

-- 
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