Re: have proxies hit the big time? (fwd)

On Sun, Mar 21, 1999 at 07:11:30PM -0700, Dax Kelson wrote:
>
>
> ---------- 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.
>

Hope this works better than auto proxy in 4 and 3. We found that that clients
were still occasionally accessing port 80 directly, despite being PAC'ed with
no DIRECT entries. This caused helpdesk problems as we have a redirect to
a web page telling them to configure their proxies if they try a direct port 80
access (obviously this infuriates the average user and helpdesk operator if
the proxies are configured and they still get the "configure your proxies"
message in their browser).

tom@interact.net.au
Received on Sun Mar 21 1999 - 21:33:46 MST