Re: persistant connections and proxies
Daniel DuBois (dan@spyglass.com)
Tue, 28 May 1996 14:36:32 -0500
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/