[squid-users] Intentional Forwarding Loop ...

All,

We use squid in conjunction with the Trend Interscan Viruswall product to do
http Virus scanning. We are doing this via a cache_peer ie:

client -> squid -> viruswall -> destination_web_server

squid and viruswall are on the same host.

We have recently migrated the proxy server to Solaris SPARC from Linux. The
current SPARC release of Viruswall seems to have a fault in its web
retrieval engine that causes URLs with "%20" (space) in the URL string to
fail. As a diagnostic process, we got the viruswall to peer back with squid
and sure enough, the problem disappeared. ie:

client -> squid -> viruswall -> squid -> destination_web_server

Normally, we would have stopped at this point and just followed this through
with Trend (which we have done by the way) but we also got another outcome -
surfing was faster than if you use Interscan to do the web retrieval ... ie,
the squid retrieval engine is a lot more efficient than the viruswall one.
As a result, I'd like to retain the config, even when Trend come up with a
fix.

Now the downside of the above is that I am creating a forwarding loop of
course. This doesn't seem to cause any problems other than filling up the
logs. My questions:

- Am I likely to come up against other problems with this configuration?
- Is there a maximum number of "hops" for peer'ed caches?
- Any way of supressing the Forwarding Loop errors?

Any help appreciated ...

Regards

James

James Hall-Kenney
Senior Security Consultant
Network Operations Centre
DMZGlobal Limited
        
Phone: +64 4 917 5940
Mobile: +64 21 519-988
Email: Mailto:james.hall-kenney@dmzglobal.com
WWW: http://www.dmzglobal.com

Important: This electronic mail message and attachments (if any) are
confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended
recipient please contact us immediately and destroy this message. You may
not legally copy, disclose, disseminate or use the contents in any way.
Thank you.
Received on Sun Apr 08 2001 - 23:00:16 MDT