[squid-users] Seamless squid fail-over with requirements

We've got several FreeBSD gateways, each redirecting
http traffic to a central squid cache. The cache is under
quite a load, so it's taken down for maintenance often
and hangs not so rarely, too. When bad things happen,
a perl script on each gateway detects the failure (within
5 seconds) and ceases redirections, letting http traffic
through NAT until the cache goes up again.

This is fine mostly. The thing is a proxy is much nicer
than plain NAT in many aspects. Also, when squid
goes down there's an effective 10-15 seconds' gap in
sevice, resulting in numerous time-outs, interruptions of
big downloads and other difficulties.

What I want is to run proxy-only squid on each gateway,
which should redirect all requests to the central cache. I
think this way the fail-over will be more seamless.

We've got 2 custom requirements, though:
1. The central cache must see the IP's of its clients
2. Redirector on the central cache must work

Is there a sane way to do this?
Received on Thu Feb 02 2006 - 02:41:55 MST