Parent selection with squid v2 - parent ignored?

I have just looked through the logfiles and noticed that the parent cache
isn't queried at all, but it either says "CACHE_DIGEST_HIT" or "DIRECT".
(There have been 9 queries to the PARENT after a few thousand requests
processed, some CACHE_DIGEST_HITS)

The host is entered correctly as a parent cache in the config file. The
cachemgr.cgi says
Parent : proxy.du.dpn.de/8080/8081
Flags :
Address[0] : 194.77.9.60
Address[1] : 194.77.8.11
Status : Up
AVG RTT : 0 msec
LAST QUERY : 908093145 seconds ago
LAST REPLY : 908093145 seconds ago
PINGS SENT : 0
PINGS ACKED: 0 0%
FETCHES : 131 0%
IGNORED : 0 0%
Histogram of PINGS ACKED:
keep-alive ratio: 88%

The LAST QUERY/LAST REPLY looks suspicious to me.

I am getting the same effect with our filtering proxy (ie another squid which
runs http_anonymizer paranoid and a complex redirector to stop web spam) which
runs on the same machine as the main cache and which is _supposed_ to just
filter and pass on the request to the main cache - if I do the "never_direct
allow all" I sometimes get the message that the parent cache is unreachable
and that the proxy can't answer the request. (While the main cache is running
perfectly)

"minimum_direct_hops" is set to 3, and almost all the requests are way beyond
that.

I also saw this
908092938.596 823 212.8.193.90 TCP_MISS/302 566 POST
http://www.quark.com/ftpwizard.cgi - CACHE_DIGEST_HIT/proxy.du.dpn.de
text/html

A CACHE_DIGEST_HIT for a POST ?

This is squid-2.0.PATCH1 on Red Hat 5.1 / kernel 2.0.36pre14 compiled with
./configure --enable-icmp --enable-delay-pools --enable-cache-digests
--enable-err-language=German --sbindir=/usr/sbin --bindir=/usr/sbin
--sysconfdir=/etc/squid2

Sincerely,
    Lars Marowsky-Brée
        

--
Lars Marowsky-Brée
Network Management
teuto.net Netzdienste GmbH - DPN Verbund-Partner