On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 11:04:38AM -0500, alex@nac.net wrote: ==>> i believe WCCP is more a heartbeat mechanism - the router will age WCCP ==>> 'hello' packets and expire them. presumably if it doesn't hear one of the ==>> cache engines 'check in', it'll stop forwarding traffic to it. ==> ==>Your missing what I said. What if the cache continues sending WCCP ==>packets, but the cache itself has died? I haven't yet encountered a situation where the cache was having a problem and yet was still responding and talking WCCP to the router. When our Cache Engines have experienced problems, they have removed themselves from the available pool or stopped responding to WCCP (which, in turn, caused them to be removed). In short, I believe there's a very strong mechanism to check all functions of the cache before saying "hey, I'm okay here". /cah