Re: Q: Parent running but not caching?

On Fri, 9 Aug 1996, Peter Childs wrote:

> In article <4uci21$4pl@al.imforei.apana.org.au> you wrote:
>
> : Is there a way to configure squid to cope with a Netscape parent which is
> : up, but not running the cache software ? At the moment squid gets a reply
> : to its UDP enquiry (bounced off port 7) because the parent is running
> : TCP/IP, but gets a rude reply when it tries to make a TCP connection to
> : the data port (8080).
>
> If the server doesn't support caching/proxying then don't have it as
> a parent.

In this case the server is supposed to be running a cache, but isn't. I
haven't been able to find out whether the cache program has been stopped
for development purposes or has broken. The problem is that squid's check
for aliveness (against a Netscape cache) only checks that UDP on the
machine is alive, not the cache software. Since the inactive parent always
responds fastest, squid is helpless until I manually remove the offending
parent from the tables. A couple of possible solutions come to mind (there
are no doubt others):

1) Check aliveness of the cache s/w, not the machine (does the Netscape
   cache make any visible difference to the machine it runs on?)
2) Squid could perhaps record the fact that a host is returning 'connection
   refused' on it's supposed cache service port, and not use the parent
   again until some timeout expires. The individual request which
   detected the problems could either be failed, or re-processed with the
   modified list of parents.

Andrew

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