[squid-users] Drop semi-dead peer upon zero sized replies

Hello, there.

I am an unfortunate subscriber of a dreadful ISP here in Argentina.
Before explaining my problem, I should mention that switching over to
some other ISP is not an option, as there aren't any in my area. Also,
their customer support has always been non-existent; their employees are
in fact on strike right now, so complaints are just getting piled.

There's a transparent proxy that is misconfigured (maybe it's on purpose
because of the strike, nobody knows; pity us). Sometimes everything
works just fine, some others, I don't get any packets back from the
proxy so I can't browse some or any sites.

To circumvent this, I have a handful of Squid servers with better lines
I can peer with, and they work just fine. The problem is that the
bandwidth that they offer me is much less than the one I'd have with a
direct connection. Therefore I'd like to configure my ISP's transparent
proxy as a peer (the first one), plus a never_direct line; and make
squid detect when it's returning zero sized replies and temporarily
disable it as if it were down all together.

As for the first part, that's easy since the firewall intercepts
anything with dst port 80, so I added a peer with this stateful
firewall's IP address, HTTP port 80, disabled ICP and configured it as a
parent.

But I don't know about the second part: detecting when it's "down". It
is "sort of down", since it will reply pings et al, but no HTTP packets
will come back from it until it's back into normal operation.

Any tips will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

-- 
redondos