How's that for an eye-catching topic? Basically I want to do two weird things with Squid. I was about to start writing my own custom, cut down web proxy that had certain characterstics I'm looking for (but would have run like half a dog no doubt) but I was reading over some Squid documentation and in many ways it looks like it would beat me at my own game - provided the following oddnesses of configuration are possible. First, I understand that you can set up other proxies as siblings and when you do this squid will query several of them (all?) at the same time and take the first good answer. Neat, didn't realise it could do that - but does it query the original source at the same time? What I really want is a collection of siblings that I might want to change often, and I'd like squid to not query the source directly, even if that might be faster - in fact, ideally, even if all the siblings failed. Also, because the set of siblings I'm using will often change and I can't afford to take the proxy down when this happens, I need to know if it would be possible to change squid's set of configured siblings without taking it down first. In an ideal world I'd love it if squid could keep track of its siblings' statuses and automatically forget them if they failed to respond, say, fifty consecutive times but I guess that's probably just too unusual so I'd be happy to work around it. Any comments, suggestions would be welcomed. Many thanks! - Geoff
