squid capabilities

Hi -

I'd like to be able to use squid as an intermediary for our application
which pulls stock quotes from www.moneynet.com. Since we occasionally have
trouble getting to the site, I'd like to add a machine running squid which
our application can pull from instead of going to moneynet. Ideally, squid
would respond with the latest cache data if it couldn't reach moneynet for
whatever reason, instead of responding with an error. I've looked through
the documentation and the config file, but I don't see an option that
appears to allow that. Is this possible?

Also, I'd like to be able to make all my planned modifications on squid
alone, leaving the application as is. It sounds like with http acceleration
(and perhaps transparent proxying?) I could continue to have my application
request http://www.moneynet.com but have the request handled by squid
instead of going directly to moneynet. If I could then have squid respond
with cache data in the event of connectivity failure as described above, I'd
be one happy sysadmin. ;)

If anyone could offer some pointers, even just subject topics in the
documentation, it would help a lot.

Thanks,

Erik Larkin
Received on Fri Jul 07 2000 - 11:24:59 MDT