Re: ADVICE NEEDED: Netscape Proxy Server with Squid Server as a parent

On Wed, 15 Apr 1998 dbaljevi@csc.com wrote:

> This is the scenario: upstream ISP uses Squid Proxy Server. For some
> reasons (difficult for me to explain), the company plans to use Netscape
> Proxy Server on its side. Now, I am not sure how Netscape Proxy Server

I think the issue is "if" rather than "how" :)

> under Windows/NT works (and could not find much useful information on
> the Net; plus, telephone call and an email message to Netscape
> Australia has still not been answered!?), so the question is simple:
>
> Can a Netscape Proxy Server (or for the sake of brevity, any other
> non-Unix
> proxy server) be used with Squid Proxy Server as a parent? In other
> words, if
> someone has a Netscape Proxy Server and wants to "delegate" requests to
> a Squid parent server - would it work? Has anyone done it? Is there a
> compatibility
> issue?

Unless the featureset in the Netscape proxy server has been dramatically
reduced, there should be no problems in setting up your NS proxy to hand
off all upstream requests do a different cache.

I haven't used NS proxy for a good long while (so this could now be wrong)
but I wasn't aware of any ICP support in the product. If this is still the
case, then you will run into problems if the upstream cache ever dies -
the NS cache will report failures for any operation that causes it to try
and fetch an object from the network until the upstream cache comes back
on line.

One thing I would hope that Netscape have fixed by now is the garbage
collection on the cache - the cache would happly fill past a high-water
mark, after which a separate garbage collection process was spawned by the
proxy which ran at an absurdly high priority and monopolised the machine
until it was complete. I suppose I could have hacked around and niced the
gc process down, but I gave up in disgust before I got to that point.

You might not hit the problem on NT, because presumably the box will crash
before any garbage collection becomes necessary ;)

> Regards from "down-under" (far away Australia),

Hello from across the Tasman,

Joe

--
Joe Abley <jabley@clear.co.nz>      Tel +64 9 912-4065, Fax +64 9 912-5008
Network Architect, CLEAR Net                      http://www.clear.net.nz/