Re: Cache-, not proxy-aware browsers?

On Fri, 6 Dec 1996, Lars-Owe Ivarsson wrote:
[...]
> useful I patched the code of my Mosaic so that if the cache didn't answer,
> then it wouldn't bother with the cache for 15 minutes but talk directly to the
> WWW server instead.
>
> Is this a reasonable solution to alleviate the undesirably high dependence of
> cache server uptime? Or is there some murky technicality that makes this an
> infeasible approach? Does anybody know what browser suppliers think of this?

This feature seems to be built into Netscape's "Automatic" proxy
configuration system. You can specify a number of proxy servers for
fault tolerance, and include the "DIRECT" keyword to bypass the proxy
servers completely. There is an algorithm to determine how long the
browser ignores the proxy servers before trying to use them again
where the first time it avoids them for 20 minutes, then 40 minutes,
then 60, etc. See the Squid FAQ for the URL to the approprite
Netscape document on how to setup automatic proxies. I can't see any
intuitively obvious way of setting this up manually in Netscape.

(I don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer enough to know it in detail,
and have long since stopped using Mosaic. Normally, I use Lynx but
without the proxy cache services. For my usage, it would only delay
things.)

I'll leave the rest of the questions to those who may be more
knowledgable given I only started setting up a Squid cache on one
server of my client yesterday. Of course, I've used Squid as a user
often, and still have a site using the Harvest engine.

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Received on Fri Dec 06 1996 - 00:21:54 MST