Problems proxying Altavista

Hi!

Has anybody else experienced this problem? Is there a way to fix it? Is
there a bug id with a vendor?

We're running Squid beta 17 as the main proxy cache for a couple of local
universities and colleges. After having run it on an UltraSPARC for a
week-long test, we switched to our main machine again three days ago, a
SPARCstation 20 that had just been upgraded to Solaris 2.5 .

>From that moment on, we've been experiencing a strange problem with the
Altavista search engine, an important tool for the researchers of our
client institutions. A neighbor university running squid on the same
architecture began experiencing the same kind of trouble about two weeks
ago -- and routed their Altavista traffic through our then UltraSPARC
system which didn't experience this problem.

Requests to Altavista seem to hang forever on SPARC systems running
Solaris 2.4 or 2.5. Requests to Altavista from the same subnet from
machines running different OSs (including SunOS 4) seem to be unaffected.
 I had to install squid on a separate machine to route Altavista requests
from our main proxy through that machine (a multi-processor Alpha, one of
our two main compute servers). The new hierarchy_acl feature came in
handy there, because /cgi-bin/ and ? requests needed to befiltered out for
all neighbors and parents *except* the one processing Altavista requests.

Telnet to Altavista's port 80 produces the same problem, as do all kinds
of web browsers running on the same architecture.

A couple of other sites (less important -- to us) seem to produce the same
problem.

Any hints?

Thanks, and my apologies if this is not really the right address for this
question.

Andreas

-- 
Andreas Strotmann       / ~~~~~~ \________________A.Strotmann@Uni-Koeln.DE
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