Re: Help with parent cache

On Sunday 15 December 96, at 15 h 51, the keyboard of Alberto de Poo Bas
<adepoo@tamnet.com.mx> wrote:

> I want squid to get all the files thru a Windows95 proxy program called
> WinProxy that also use 3128 but no 3130, but many times in the week this

It probably means that the MS-Windows machine doesn't handle ICP :-( and
hence Squid cannot detect if it's running fine or not.

> 4.- If WinProxy send the error message (connection timeout) then go
> directly to the source.
>
> Can this be done?

The Squid way is to test availability of a parent, by ICP if possible
(typically port 3130), by echo otherwise. First, check if your MS-Windows
box has an echo server which could be used by Squid. It runs typically on
port 7, so "telnet the-win95 7" will show it.

Useful programs:

Unix echo client:
ftp://ftp.pasteur.fr/pub/Network/echoping
MS-Windows echo server (not tested):
http://www.ccs.org/winsock/xref-e.html#echo_servers

But the test with echo only proves that the parent machine is alive, not
that the proxy runs fine.

> The strange thing in this is that WinProxy can always reply, but sometimes
> it reply with information from the site, and some other time, only a
> winproxy error show.

Squid switches automatically to a direct access (if you didn't play with
single_parent_bypass or inside_firewall) if the parent is unable to
reply. If it doesn't there is a problem. Check Squid logs.

Hypothesis: if the parent replies with a correct HTTP response, Squid
still considers it as alive. What is the actual response ? (HTTP headers
and data.)

You can dump the session with Squid:

debug_options ALL,1 12,5

or with Muffin:

http://www.sdsu.edu/~boyns/java/muffin/

or with url_get:

ftp://ftp.pasteur.fr/pub/Network/url_get

> I want to do this, because we have better connection from the PC machine,
> do to a special connection, if the info don't get from it, we want to get

In that case, the correct (IMHO) solution is to install Linux or FreeBSD
on the PC and to run Squid on it. You cannot (IMHO) run a serious server
on MS-Windows 95.
Received on Mon Dec 16 1996 - 00:53:02 MST