Re: Proxy-connection

On Fri, Sep 01, 2000 at 10:19:32PM -0400, John C. Mallery wrote:
> Can anybody give me a url to some documentation on this header,
> and especially, how to get http 1.0 clients to do some rudimentary
> persistence on requests through a 1.1 proxy?

I don't know of any specs. But basically it works just like the ol'
'Connection: keep-alive' header, except that it only applies to
proxies. Of course it has the same basic problem as the original
Connection header (see section 19.6.2 in rfc 2616) in that if you
have two proxies in series and the first one doesn't understand
the Proxy-Connection header and therefore forwards it to the second
proxy which does understand it, you'll have a mess.

Anyway, if you're writing a 1.1 proxy then you can certainly use the
Proxy-Connection header on the client connection side (but only if the
client is 1.0, of course), with the caveat that if that client is
actually a 1.0 proxy which doesn't understand the Proxy-Connection then
you're in trouble. I'm not sure if I understand your "how to get 1.0
clients to ..." - other than sending back Proxy-Connection headers if
the client sent one, and making sure a Content-Length header is present
in the response as often as possible (this may mean generating it if
possible), there's nothing you can do.


  Cheers,

  Ronald

Received on Saturday, 2 September 2000 14:30:08 UTC