A stoopid question? (disk object balance)

G'day,

I am looking at setting up a squid cache here and I found the page on
sizing for intel boxes very informative. I noticed that many people on
that page had 'N' caches load sharing and I am wondering just how to
configure mine to load share (well not load share in a network sense but
a disk sense). Do I have to hack something like pluggw to get the objects
spread over two machines?

Basically I intend to have:

   +------------+ +------------+
   | proxy 1 | | proxy 2 |
   | IP: .9.10 | | IP: .9.11 |
   | IP: .9.20 | | | <--- 9.20 if proxy1 fails
   +------------+ +------------+

with one box having a second IP number of 9.20 and 9.20 being the
advertised IP address of the web proxy. .9.20 will fail over to the
second box should the proxy1 fail. Both proxies will be siblings of
each other, so from that point of view they will be 'one cache', but
how do I share the requests so that the objects are shared over the
machines.

Now at this stage you are probably saying 'use a cisco redirector box'
but I am too cheap for that :). I dont want to use a DNS magic
solution either (we dont run smart DNS and its hard to change it). I dont
really care about net bandwidth between these boxes (we have a
switched 100M ethernet), so what I really want is to share the requests
between the boxes directly so the objects end up on disk on each box.

I cant see any way for squid on proxy1 to send, say 50%, of its misses
to proxy 2. I think running a 'nanoproxy' on the 9.20 address that has
both real caches as its parent and uses round-robin but no local
disk space it self looks too hard (well it would be easy, but I cant
see an easy way to do it without using more disk space :( and I just
dont want that complexity).

My solution is looking like writeing something like pluggw which sits on
9.20 and shares the load by redirecting the requests to 9.10 or 9.11 (randomly
or something).

I know I am going to get problems with object consistancy etc, but I
can live with that.

Any comments on this?

cheers,
cam

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