[squid-users] forcing a default parent

dear all,

does squid allow using a forcible default parent (out of 2 available
parents), which is omitted ONLY if it fails?

if have a mesh of 4 cache boxes, where two of these are 'inner' proxies and
2 are 'outer' proxies.

i want to define a default path which directs the request through inner1
and outer1. with an alteon switch i managed to have inner2 automatically
take over if the squid port on inner1 fails - but i don't want to use such
a backup for the outer proxies, because i believe it is not very useful
when the cache boxes communicate with each other (digests) and the real ip
addresses of the proxies are hidden behind a virtual address which manages
the backup.

i though i could handle that with configuring the children to use a default
parent.

now, this is the way i have configured the inner proxies (children)

+++
cache_peer outer1 parent 8081 3130 no-query weight=100 default
cache_peer outer2 parent 8081 3130 no-query weight=20
+++

after i had configured the inner proxies i tried and shut down the outer1.
that resulted in continuous operation with outer2 as parent - which is very
ok for me...
when outer1 was up again, the client continued to fetch data from outer2
until squid's regular digest update was due - then it went back to using
outer1 for about 90% of the requests. the other 10% are still send to
outer2. i guess this is, because inner1 still knows about outer2 and its
cached data because of the cache digest.
is there a way to render the digest invalid after a certain amount of time
or would you advise not to do so?

i think attachments are not allowed for this list, but i could send a
drawing to anyone who's interested.

thanks for your help.

Best regards

Torsten Lange
Received on Tue Jun 19 2001 - 03:10:56 MDT