gzip encoding weirdness.

Hi,

Apologies for not being active on the lists over this week.. big
non-squid project. :-)

Whilst running a transparent proxy I've found something rather weird.

Here's a direct connection..

adrian@rocky: telnet www.enetica.com.au 80
Trying 203.17.36.111...
Connected to www.enetica.com.au.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.enetica.com.au

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 13:26:54 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.17 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_ssl/2.8.0 OpenSSL/0.9.6
Last-Modified: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 08:09:37 GMT
ETag: "163206-294b-3d5cb341"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 10571
Content-Type: text/html

.. now, here's the same request, going through the proxy:

[localhost:~] adrian% telnet www.enetica.com.au 80
Trying 203.17.36.111...
Connected to www.enetica.com.au.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.enetica.com.au

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 10:21:13 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.17 (Unix) PHP/4.1.2 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_ssl/2.8.0 OpenSSL/0.9.6
Last-Modified: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 08:09:37 GMT
ETag: "163206-294b-3d5cb341"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 2661
Age: 1427
X-Cache: HIT from <foo>
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from <foo>
Connection: keep-alive

Connection closed by foreign host.

.. someone has requested it already, with a gzip-encoded reply.

Now, IE under macos doesn't want to display gzip-encoded web pages,
and I'm _not_ entirely sure this is valid behaviour.

Can someone HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 cluey explain whether this is valid or
invalid, please?

adrian
Received on Sun Aug 25 2002 - 07:36:04 MDT