Re: persistant connections and proxies

At 02:37 PM 5/28/96 -0700, Peter Churchyard wrote:
>Our Gauntlet Internet Firewall has an http proxy that if used in 
>transparent mode does show problems with Netscape clients talking to 
>Microsoft and Netscape servers. The proxy does pass through the headers 
>and the server and client do think they have a persistant connection 
>except that the proxy doesn't.

Netscape browsers don't send "Connection: keep-alive" to proxies.  I beleive
what you are describing is not a proxy, but actually a gateway.  In other
words, if the client doesn't know it's a proxy, it's not a proxy.

The issue of what is appropriate behavior for a "server-side proxy" (AKA
not-a-proxy-gateway) has been discussed before with regards to other topics,
and I remember Roy Fielding's opinion was that it was not HTTP's
problem/jurisdiction.  I don't know if Roy or the rest of the group still
feels that way.

>Clients configured with proxy handoffs don't normally have problems since 
>the proxy persistant connection attempt by the client is ignored by the 
>server.

This doesn't make any sense to me.  When talking to a proxy, the persistent
connection attempt isn't "ignored by the server", rather it's never sent by
the client.

-----
Daniel DuBois, Software Animal          
                                     dan@spyglass.com
                                     http://www.spyglass.com/~ddubois/

Received on Tuesday, 28 May 1996 14:36:32 UTC