default parent

Hi,

I've got a question. I'm kinda newbie to squid, sorry about that. I've got
the following setup:

I've a lan with 1-2 hundred PCs, some servers, and I wanted some of them
to see the Internet. I've got a 64 k line to another country, from where I
can get Internet access, it's pay per machine (pay per IP address). I
wanted to hack that, so I set up RedHat 5.0 and Squid 1.1.19 (from the
RPM) on one of the Internet enabled IP addresses. Our direct Internet
connection is kinda bad, only about 20-30 percent of the Internet hosts
are accessible. I guess this is due to a source IP address change for
every outgoing packet, and destination IP address change for every
incoming packet, plus a packet-filtering firewall it goes through.

There's a cache already on the other end of the 64k line, which works
great, through the cache, browsers installed on the internet-enabled
IP-addressed PCs can access all the sites on the Internet. I set up squid
to use this cache as parent, default no-query, as far as I understood it
from the docs, it's correct, if there's only one parent on the network. I
start squid, it says parent configured. Then I access pages, and squid ALL
THE TIME opens DIRECT connections to hosts, which either works or not. cnn
does work, nbc does not and so on. The hosts doesn't work create an entry
in one of the logs, generally read error to xxx, or time out.

So, my problem is that squid doesn't use the parent cache at all. I know
the parent cache is working, it's set up to every browser (on the
pay-per-ip machines), and it does serve requests from browsers.

My first set up was with the same cache, parent, default. That time my
squid used ICP queries, and there were two times, when I've got
default_parent, instead of DIRECT in the log, so there were two objects,
which came in from the parent cache, instead from the original source.
After some time, there were signs in the log-file, that my squid
considered the parent dead, while browsers still could use it as cache.

But since I specified no-query (this is because I don't want to get in
trouble with the ISP, setting up cache without permission, and I guess ICP
is only used between caches), there's nothing in the logs about a dead
parent, but squid just doesn't use the parent cache. Direct connection
fails most of the time, so I'm stucked.

Can I somehow force squid to use the default parent cache all the time
instead of using DIRECT connections, which generally fail?

Any help is very much appreciated.

Bye,

LAci
Received on Tue Jan 27 1998 - 22:52:14 MST