Re: transparency - and DNS lookups

From: Henrik Nordstrom <hno@dont-contact.us>
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 23:16:38 +0200

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Dancer wrote:

> Trivial disagreement: Browsers just don't seem to...but the client
> machine may have no domain configured in any case.

This was a specific case, which I still consider as a browser/client
bug.

* Transparent proxy mode
* Client configured with a DNS search path that included .digital.com to
ease navigation to altavista.digital.com.
* Squid failed to process this transproxy request since it only got
"altavista" from the Host: header, and have no idea what "altavista" is.

And the browser/client bug is that the browser does a DNS lookup of the
requested host, but does not fill in the returned FQDN in the Host:
header when sending the request.

The HTTP specification is not written with "short" hostnames in mind. A
FQDN is indirectly required (HTTP RFC2068 refers to section 2.1 of
RFC1123, which in the last sencence of seems to imply that valid host
names are on FQDN format).

> Are you suggesting something of the sort of thing like:
> host_alias altavista www.altavista.digital.com
> host_alias hell www.microsoft.com

No. Simply a redirector that does a advanced variant of what most
browsers do when not using a proxy: Search in DNS for a matching host
and redirect the request to that host if found (with a configurable
search pattern list).

/Henrik

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Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:49 MDT

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