Re: Proxies and gethostbyname

>I disagree ... there is a large difference between not being able to
>resolve a name and not being able to connect to an IP address.

>From the point of view of the proxy, yes.  From the user's perspective,
both indicate a failure of the proxy to map the identifier to a service.
Whether that failure was due to a down IP interface or a bad DNS entry or
a nonexistant DNS entry or a very slow DNS gateway may be useful for
further diagnostics (and the proxy is certainly capable of recording
those facts), but none of these can be used by the user agent to
automatically handle the failure in a distinguishable manner, nor
is it the user agent's responsibility to track the performance
characteristics if the proxy's external network environment.  Even if
such a thing were desirable for a given proxy, the design principles of
simplicity and separation of concerns suggest that it be transmitted
separately from the main protocol stream (e.g., via SNMP monitoring).

....Roy