Re: proxy gateway service announcement/testing

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Fri, 11 Feb 1994 08:49:19 --100


I sent Kevin Altis this message (about a discussion of Mosaic proxy
gateways):

>Inside Xerox, we'd like to have a different kind of proxy service,
>where the decision of whether to go direct or try the proxy server
>might depend on the host address as well as the protocol type.
>
>Any suggestions? So far, I've been hacking the sources instead.

and he replied:

> Actually, Lou, NCSA guys, Ari, etc., and I have discussed this. The general
> idea is to do a string compare against a host.domain list that you don't
> need to proxy. This kind of feature would be added in the next revision of
> the clients if we can work out all the other issues. This is a good
> discussion topic for www-talk since it would be nice for the clients to do
> this in a standard way.

> ka

So, in response, I'm sending this out to www-talk:

At least for us, string compare against host.domain list isn't as good
as a binary compare against an include/exclude list of partial address
masks.

The procedure we've been using is to have a table of "no proxy partial
addresses" and "exceptions". Most internal hosts can route directly to
our class A (net 13) net, as well as a few hosts that are `inside the
firewall' but are on a separate class C net.

Right now, the tables are wired in, but it would be great if they were
available as a loadable resource or configuration file.