[squid-users] persistent or sticky load balancing possible with Squid?

Hello,

I couldn't find an answer in the documentation or the FAQ and also not in the
mailing list archives, so I post it in here, hoping that someone knows a
solution:

If you have two parent Squid caches and you do basic load balancing between them
by using "round-robin" in the cache_peer statement, Squid also alternates
between the two parents within a single user connection. Meaning, it alternates
for every object retrieved within the same user connection to the proxy.

Some sites, namely online banking sites, refuse such requests for security
reasons. They rely on a persistent connection from the same source address.

So, my question is:

How can I configure Squid to do load balancing with the "round-robin" feature,
but keep a connection running on the same parent proxy? It should just
load-balance connections, but not requests within a single connection.

I tried to force it by using the "neighbor_type_domain" option, but it didn't
work:

neigbor_type_domain first.cache parent my.banks.domain

I got it working by using:

acl MYBANK dstdomain .my.banks.domain

cache_peer_access second.cache deny MYBANK

But, this solution is not redundant. If first.cache fails, I have to manually
change the configuration of my child proxy.

I guess, DNS round-robin wouldn't solve this, too. The addresses would switch
within one connection for every object retrieved, right?

Andre

--
Andre Schneickert
andre.schneickert@de.transport.bombardier.com