Re: IE5 Squid and redirect

Steven Sporen writes:
> Hi,
>
> I want to redirect all upgrade requests for IE5 to an internal ftp server - thus
> saving on bandwidth. I downloaded the files and placed them on an internal
> FTP server. Then I configured squirm (The redirector I'm using with squid) to
> redirect to the local ftp server. If I request the files using my browser
> (browsing through the ftp directories) the file comes down and looks ok. But
> when I run the Microsoft install program it tries and then moves on to another
> ftp server (one I'm not redirecting for) and proceeds to download it from there.
>
> Anybody got any ideas on what's wrong and how I can fix it?
>

Hi Steven,

We managed to implement here (a small ISP) what you are trying to
do. We fool the install program with a home-grown squid redirector
into thinking that our ftp server is the only one server available for
downloading the IE5 files.

The install program for IE5 and IE4 uses an hard-coded
URL on the www.microsoft.com server to get a data file which contains
the available www and ftp servers for downloading the IE files. Our
redirector rewrites this URL to an internal URL on our http server
thus allowing us to present to the install program a different list of
download servers (our ftp server).

If you want to follow our approach here is a step by step guide:

1. configure your redirector to rewrite the URL (maybe redirection
works also)
'http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie5/download/rtw/x86/ie5sites.dat'
to another URL on one of your http servers, for example
'http://your.server/msdownload/ie5sites.dat'.

The ie5sites.dat at the above URL is used to install IE5 on Windows
95, 98 or NT on Intel.

2. download yourself the ie5sites.dat file from microsoft and append
the location where you downloaded the IE5 files on your ftp server to
it or create this file from scratch and put this location on it. We
have choose the second option because all our users pass through the
proxy and there is no point in downloading the IE5 files from other
locations as we have them on our ftp server.

To the ie5sites.dat file add the following line customized to your
taste:

"ftp://your.server/path_to_IE5_files","Your company","EN","Your
company location"

The first field is the URL to the place where you downloaded the files
on your server, the second field is a free form text field where you
may put your company name for example, the third field contains the
language this version of IE5 is for and the fourth field is another
free form text field.

I apologize for this long message but I hope that it will help you
(and others) to implement better utilization of bandwidth :)

Radu Greab
Received on Tue Mar 30 1999 - 04:40:19 MST