Re: Proxy and HTTP protocol versions

Sudha Subramanian wrote:

>  I'm trying to implement a proxy server. The proxy server does nothing
>  but just forwards the request to the destination server.

Then why do you need a proxy? And why can't you use an existing proxy?

>  1. For implementing a proxy as simple as this ( just forward request
>  back and forth), do I have to bother myself with the HTTP protocol
>  versions etc.

You probably will want to do that, although if you close all connection
always you can probably ignore it for starters.

>  2. I understand from a bit of googling that I should be removing the
>  'Proxy-Connection' from the request header so that we won't have to
>  worry about a broken link even if the upstream proxy does not support
>  it. Is there anyother field like this that I should deal with ? Does
>  this apply to both HTTP 1.0 as well as HTTP 1.1 ?

Proxy-Connection is not a standard header and it can be good to remove it,
the headers you should remove even for this simple proxy can be found
in �13.5.1 in rfc 2616 (which can be found at 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt).

Setting "Connection: close" and removing any "Keep-Alive", 
"Proxy-Authenticate"
and "Proxy-Authorization" should probably work for most sites. 


For HTTP/1.0 (rfc 1945) there are no hop-headers mentioned so If you do 
HTTP/1.0
you should be able to forward all headers and still follow the 
specification. In that
case you should make sure that the request your proxy forwards is HTTP/1.0.

/robo

Received on Saturday, 7 June 2003 13:02:27 UTC