[squid-users] Looking for offline mode on an online cache.

Greetings,

I'm trying to learn how to have an online squid server act in offline
mode in the event that the remote server is unreachable. I've found a
couple of people in the archives asking about this, but without replies. :(

More specificaly, we're including remote content via port 80 http
requsts in some of the pages on our website. This works ok while we are
able to contact the remote server, however, our pages start to hang or
timeout when the remote server is unavailable.

Thinking about this, it would seem to be wise to insert a squid caching
proxy into the middle of these transactions for two reasons. One, both
our site and the remote site should benefit from caching, making both
sites more responsive. And Two, if this is in anyway possible, it would
prevent our site from hanging when the remote site was unavailable
because squid would serve that last item held in it's cache (as I
understand offline mode to work).

The sticky point is that the remote content is pretty dynamic. When the
remote site is available, we'd want to cache for 5 minutes tops. But on
the other hand, when the remote server is unavailable, serving anything,
regardless of age, is better than nothing. The other potential sticky
point is that we have multiple remote sites that we pull content from.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff Adams
Webmaster
Hoover's Online
Received on Mon Nov 04 2002 - 14:38:39 MST