Load Balancing and Failover in Squid Proxy

[mantissa]

Hi All,

First thing - hats off to the pfSense team for such a fantastic project - it's made life for a lot of us a whole lot simpler and productive.

I currently have the following pfSense setup:

pfSense 1.2 RC2
2 WAN Connections used in Load Balancing and Failover

My load balancing works absolutely great without squid proxy we and any time any of my WAN connections fails - shifts over pretty seamlessly (also for web traffic) .

Now after installing squid proxy (running it in transparent mode) - when both WANs are working fine - squid proxy works absolutely fine. However, when one of the WANs fails - I notice that while other services fail over to the functioning WAN - web traffic users routed through the proxy start getting 'no route to host' errors almost as though it's not failing over like the other services. Almost seems like squid proxy does a hard binding to one of my WANs , and routing dies along with it if that WAN connection fails. If I shut off squid proxy at that stage i.e. disable the proxy the web traffic goes through correctly.

Has anyone seen a similar problem? Has anyone come up with any solutions of how to deal with it? Is there an easy work around to this?

Thanks!

[lhrt]

Hi Mantissa,

The squid package is not multi wan capable right now. I think there is patch available for this.
If i am not wrong squid multi wan fail over support will be on 1.3 version.

Regards,
Lhrt

[mantissa]

Hi Lhrt,

Thanks for the note. I did try the Multi-WAN patch which works great for controlling traffic flow of select subnets through specific gateways. Unfortunately, nothing there unfortunately that supports automatic gateway switching if one fails (or load balancing for that matter). Guess I'll need to wait for 1.3.

Mantissa