Re: [squid-users] HEAD requests for non existent files on ftp

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 12:33 -0300, Guilherme Salgado wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Today I was checking if it'd be possible to use squid to proxy FTP HEAD
> requests for me, and although I found that this is handled in src/ftp.c
> and using libwww-perl's GET to issue a HEAD request on an existent file
> gave me a 200 OK response, I noticed that I'll always get a 200 OK
> response, even when the file in question doesn't exist:
..
> So, is this the intended behaviour? If so, would it be possible to
> workaround it and have a 404 response in the latter case?
>
> If not, should I file a bug about it? How hard would it be to fix?

I've filed http://www.squid-cache.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=1758
based on your description.

The code quite definately does short circuit on HEAD requests. At a
guess its because FTP has no reliable query mechanism - many FTP servers
have different output for ls, and theres no guarantee that any
accessible file will be included in ls output.

However, I think the current behaviour is entirely bogus, and we should
be able to do a
RETR
followed by a hard close of the data channel

to simulate GET for FTP.

I've copied this to squid-dev for development discussion, please
follow-up there.

Cheers
Rob

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