[squid-users] Using squid in transparent mode with two internet connections. Routing "semi"-solved.

 Hi all:

 I have a 2.4 linux machine acting as a router and performing load
balancing with two adsl connections. I'm using multipath routes and
the results are that my traffic is balanced without breaking
"sessions" (i.e. a FTP session, a HTTP session, etc). Multipath routes
work based on (src ip, dst ip, tos) triplet. I mean: all packets which
match a triplet are all sent via the same gateway (=same adsl router).
As my ADSL routers are performing NAT this assure reply packets come
back through the same gateway the request packets were sent. I've made
a little hack with iptables to force all packets' TOS field to be set
to 0x00 value (=normal TOS). In this way I got a load balancing based
ONLY on (src ip, dst ip) pair. Nice, isn't it? :-)

 Well, my problems arise now when I've set up a transparent proxy in
the main (=balancer) gateway. All http packets my clients send are
transparently forwarded to squid port. Then squid makes the
corresponding requests to the internet to fetch web data (only in case
of not having the data in cache, of course). As a direct result
routing code doesn't balance all this web traffic, due to all packets
having always the same src ip (the one of the machine where proxy
daemon lives). Summarizing: proxying breaks my balancing scheme :-(

 My questions are:
1) Is there any way to fix this? (for instance forcing squid to use
two different src ips in a round robin fashion or something like that.
Is it possible something similar?).
2) I've also made some searching on this list's archive. This topic
isn't new, I know. But I haven't seen any reasonably good solution. Is
there any way to make load balancing WITHOUT using multiple squids?
3) Supposing I choose to use several squids, is there any doc or
tutorial related to this issue (=best way of setting up this servers
with load balance's purposes, topology, etc)?

 Any idea would be greatly appreciated.

 TIA.

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    ** RoMaN SoFt / LLFB **
       roman@madrid.com
   http://pagina.de/romansoft
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Received on Wed Mar 21 2001 - 10:06:22 MST