Re: Cobalt

At 02:05 05.10.98 -0700, Gideon Glass wrote:

>We were discussing multiple caches sitting behind an L4 switch.
>ICP is not involved. Take a look at (for starters)
>
> http://www.alteon.com/products/index.phtml?page=products.html

I have already read your last mail to the list, so I know you are doing
transparent redirection. To be honest, I don't think this is a good idea
for some reasons.

Being a customer, I definitily wouldn't like packets to port 80 redirected
somewhere else when my provider talks about internet access. If you want to
force your customers to use a proxy, it's best to block outgoing port 80
and tell the people how to configure their browser. So everybody knows what
is going on.

From the technical point of view:

I've just done a nslookup of www.microsoft.com. The dark people split load
over 11 servers with different IP adresses. A cache in transparent
redirection mode will get IP adresses instead of hostnames, so you will
effectively divide your hit ratio to such a site by the number installed
servers. This is even more fatal as these sites are visited most. Also, you
will not be able to use Squid's retry and bad-marking features on such
servers.

This alternative is not better than ICP flooding. The best way to implement
load sharing is having multiple caches for your dialin pools, letting them
point at one or more parent, selecting on toplevel domains. But anyway, one
reasonable machine should be enough, failover can be done via some HA
solution.

cu.. Stefan

 +--------------------------------------------------------------+
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Received on Tue Oct 06 1998 - 01:22:20 MDT