have proxies hit the big time? (fwd)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 13:57:28 -0800
From: John Giannandrea <jg@meer.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: have proxies hit the big time?

The newly released IE5 has a proxy autodiscovery feature which has
significant practical implications for global bandwidth use.

Its hard to know how many web clients are proxied today. Its probably much
less than 50% (including AOL users). The main reason appears to be that most
clients are not configured for it by default.

With IE5, if ISPs create a CNAME called wpad and provide a file called wpad.dat
on port 80 that uses the Netscape proxy guidelines:
http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/proxy-live.html
Then IE5 will automatically use those proxies for HTTP. This is as transparent to
the end user as dynamic IP assignment or HTTP redirection.

12 months from now when the majority of PCs are shipping with this as the
default browser, it would seem that proxies will be significantly more relevant
to traffic shaping than they are today.

jg@meer.net
Received on Sun Mar 21 1999 - 19:29:26 MST