Re: Proxy and HTTP protocol versions

Sudha Subramanian wrote:

>  I'm trying to implement a proxy server. The proxy server does nothing
>  but just forwards the request to the destination server.

Then why do you need a proxy? And why can't you use an existing proxy?

>  1. For implementing a proxy as simple as this ( just forward request
>  back and forth), do I have to bother myself with the HTTP protocol
>  versions etc.

You probably will want to do that, although if you close all connection
always you can probably ignore it for starters.

>  2. I understand from a bit of googling that I should be removing the
>  'Proxy-Connection' from the request header so that we won't have to
>  worry about a broken link even if the upstream proxy does not support
>  it. Is there anyother field like this that I should deal with ? Does
>  this apply to both HTTP 1.0 as well as HTTP 1.1 ?

Proxy-Connection is not a standard header and it can be good to remove it,
the headers you should remove even for this simple proxy can be found
in §13.5.1 in rfc 2616 (which can be found at 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt).

Setting "Connection: close" and removing any "Keep-Alive", 
"Proxy-Authenticate"
and "Proxy-Authorization" should probably work for most sites. 


For HTTP/1.0 (rfc 1945) there are no hop-headers mentioned so If you do 
HTTP/1.0
you should be able to forward all headers and still follow the 
specification. In that
case you should make sure that the request your proxy forwards is HTTP/1.0.

/robo

Received on Saturday, 7 June 2003 13:02:27 UTC