Re: Paying for someone else's traffic?

David J N Begley wrote:

> As before, our proxy responds to an ICP query but the subsequent HTTP
> query from the remote proxy is for a *refresh*. This time the code is
> "200" and the file size is 6-7Kb (instead of a few hundred bytes).
>
> I *am* reading this correctly - I *am* paying for someone else's Web
> browsing traffic, right? :-/

Apparently yes.

The tools you have to control this:
1. icp_hit_stale on/off (default off == don't return ICP HIT for stale
objects)
2. miss_access, to completely deny miss accesses to your cache.

Due to some problems with miss_access, I would not recommend using it
unless someone is abusing your cache. The problem is that in some cases
your cache may deny access even after a ICP HIT, showing a error message
to legal remote users. This may happen if your cached object
changed/expired between ICP HIT and the resulting HTTP query.

Use icp_hit_stale to control if remote caches should trigger refreshes
of your cache or not. In most cases this should be left in the default
off position (don't tell remote caches to trigger a refresh of your
cache).

miss_access can be used to force the admins of remote misbehaving caches
to use your as a neighbour instead of parent. When they have configured
their cache properly as a neighbour then give them miss_access again to
avoid the problem mentioned above.

---
Henrik Nordström
Sparetime Squid Hacker