Newbie questions

Dear squid gurus,

I am new to squid and have some questions.

As far as I can see, the main advantage of squid over other caching
system is that it can talk to many other caches. Servers like cern
and spinner have to retrieve data from original source in case
of cache miss, and browsers like mosaic, netscape can only talk to
one cache. Squid can ask other caches in case of cache miss. Is it
true?

In order to talk to other caches you have to define parents and
neighbors, otherwise squid will behave like other caching servers
and will retrieve data from its original sources in case of cache
miss. Is it true?

How can I define parents and neighbors when the machine running squid
is hooked up to Internet only few hours a day? Squid seems to try to
contact parents and neighbors at startup and if it can't find them, it
say that it will ignore them.
There is a "-D" switch to disable the DNS test at startup. Is there
any switch to disable parent and neighbor check at startup?
If squid says that it will ignore a parents and neighbors, will it ask
them if the net is available?
I could of course send SIGHUP to make squid to reread squid.conf after
the machine is on the Internet, but it seems to be much nicer to start
squid with an additional flag rather than sending a signal.

Thank you for any feedback.

-- 
Kang-Jin Lee                             lee@tengu.arco.de
                                         lee@tengu.in-berlin.de
                                         2:2410/810