We've got several FreeBSD gateways, each redirecting http traffic to a central squid cache. The cache is under quite a load, so it's taken down for maintenance often and hangs not so rarely, too. When bad things happen, a perl script on each gateway detects the failure (within 5 seconds) and ceases redirections, letting http traffic through NAT until the cache goes up again. This is fine mostly. The thing is a proxy is much nicer than plain NAT in many aspects. Also, when squid goes down there's an effective 10-15 seconds' gap in sevice, resulting in numerous time-outs, interruptions of big downloads and other difficulties. What I want is to run proxy-only squid on each gateway, which should redirect all requests to the central cache. I think this way the fail-over will be more seamless. We've got 2 custom requirements, though: 1. The central cache must see the IP's of its clients 2. Redirector on the central cache must work Is there a sane way to do this?
