Charles Neerdaels: Notification for Proxy Caches

[ Probably meant for the list -- ange ]

------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Thu, 22 Feb 1996 14:56:07 -0800
From:    chuckn@java.mcom.com (Charles Neerdaels)
To:      hallam@w3.org
cc:      http-wg-request@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
Subject: Notification for Proxy Caches


Sorry for the last minute comments, but I wanted to mention a few
things with regaurds to WD-proxy-960221.

1) Using dns-name as a proxy identifier isn't sufficient. You could
have multiple proxies on a single host, so the identifier should be a
combination of host:port.

2) For Proxy-Instruction, it says proxies may strip out headers which
apply to them when passing the message on. What happens when there's a
chain or heirarchy of proxies? A server requesting logging info really
wants logging from all the proxies, but in this fashion would only get
info from those it contacts directly. Actually, much of the log
exchange and notification protocol breaks down for heirarchical
proxies. It would seem we need something more "stackable" for lack of
a better word, where intermediate proxies append information, rather
than replace it. It can still work much the same way, though for
things like the expirey field, a server may choose the lesser of
multiple values.

3) For logging exchange, there isn't much said about access control
(other than the mention of IP spoofing) so I'm assuming you'd like it
to be IP based. There are cases where log sharing can be beneficial,
and it might be better to seperate this functionality from hit
notification. Say a corporation with 1000 servers and proxies wants to
collect logs nightly, or perhaps they only want to know how many times
each servers home page was read (as a rough measure of internal load).
One could write a CGI script that returns any size portion of the log
file.

Externally, I might allow all servers to request how many hits pertain
to their site (possibly with logs) but internally I might be willing
to pass any and all logging info to trusted hosts. The logging
exchange described in the draft seems a subset of this.

Thanks, Chuck Neerdaels
Netscape Proxy Development

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Received on Friday, 23 February 1996 11:39:24 UTC