Re: Cisco WCCP and Squid

Recently, David J N Begley talked about "Re: Cisco WCCP and Squid", and said
>
> On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
>
> > to redirect web requests to a wccp engine on ethernet3/1. The question is,
> > will Squid handle Cisco redirects?
>
> As far as I can tell, Cisco hasn't published *any* technical
> specifications on the WCCP protocol (I can't find anything on CCO, nor in
> any of the Internet drafts held by the IETF) - subsequently, only Cisco
> products (or products from vendors under some agreement with Cisco) can
> use the WCCP protocol (until someone with enough spare money, time and
> generosity decides to reverse engineer the protocol I s'pose).
>
> > This would be a better solution than what John proposes in the FAQ since if
> > the proxy server is down then the service is down, whereas the cisco
> > implementation is supposed to sense whether the proxy server is up or down.
>
> Yes, this would be a "nice" addition to Squid; but without any
> specifications, what's the chance of WCCP appearing in Squid? Pretty slim
> I'd say.

If you want the reliability of the WCCP without wanting to pay
the full price for the Cisco solution, and you like Squid, I'll
put a plug in again for the Alteon ACEswitch. You don't need to
put route-maps into your Cisco and worry about process-switching
all of your web traffic, it redirects port 80 for you, it allows
you to have multiple Squid boxes hanging off the unit, with
dynamic failover in case one of the unit stops responding, and
it works at full wirespeed. Take a gigabit ethernet port in
from your access pool, send a gigabit port out to the internet
backbone router, and have 8 Squid boxes hanging off 100mb
ethernet ports, with all port 80 traffic load-balanced among
the 8 Squid boxes, and you've got a transparent proxy-cache
that will beat the pants off anything to roll out of Cisco's
labs, for a quarter the price. AND, you get to keep working
with the Squid you know and love, source code and all.

It didn't take much thinking for me to make the right choice.

> If specs *do* become available, I'd be queuing up to be one of the first
> beta-testers for WCCP support in Squid (I'd even try and code some of
> it, damnit!).

Or, simply go with the competitor, that's already using open
protocols, supporting standard ICP between Squid boxes. If
you're serious about transparent proxying, Alteon has the
solution you're looking for.
 
> Cheers..
> dave

I don't work for them, I don't even know what their building
looks like, I'm just a really happy user of their box.

Matt

-- 
InterNex Information Services   |           Matthew Petach {MP59}
Senior Network Engineer         |           mpetach@internex.net
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