Caches

Squid uses the Internet Cache Protocol (ICP) to communicate with other Web caches. Using the ICP protocols, your Squid cache can connect to other Squid caches or other cache servers, such as Microsoft proxy server, Netscape proxy server, and Novell BorderManager. This way, if your network's Squid cache does not have a copy of a requested Web page, it can contact another cache to see if it is there instead of accessing the original site. You can configure Squid to connect to other Squid caches by connecting it to a cache hierarchy. Squid supports a hierarchy of caches denoted by the terms child, sibling, and parent. Sibling and child caches are accessible on the same level and are automatically queried whenever a request cannot be located in your own Squid's cache. If these queries fail, a parent cache is queried, which then searches its own child and sibling caches—or its own parent cache, if needed—and so on. Use cache_host to set up parent and sibling hierarchical connections.

cache_host sd.cache.nlanr.net parent 3128 3130

You can set up a cache hierarchy to connect to the main NLANR server by registering your cache using the following entries in your squid.conf file:

cache_announce 24
announce_to sd.cache.nlanr.net:3131