Re: [squid-users] ftp QUOTE commands?

A HTTP proxy provides FTP services to HTTP clients for convenience and
protocol extensibility. There is no need for each and every client to
support a new protocol if there is a proxy for it, simply tell the
client to use the proxy by setting the defacto-standard
<protocol>_proxy=http://... variables.

Now in real life HTTP proxying is rarely used for protocols other than
HTTP, FTP or Gopher and "CONNECT tunneling/SSL", but there are clients
and Proxy servers who happily HTTP proxy other protocols such as news,
wais, https (without any SSL support in the client), and a wide varity
of different experimental local protocols.

If you want a full-featured FTP proxy, then install a FTP proxy. There
is plenty of them and almost all FTP clients (not web-browsers) knows
perfectly well how to use a FTP proxy.

I see absolutely no need of mixing FTP into HTTP. The way the proxying
is done is sane, doing what you propose is not. What the proxy could
theoretically do within specs is to present the user with a HTML
interface for accessing proxy-specific methods of accessing FTP features
not mappable to HTTP. How this is done is entirely up to the proxy
implementation. But I don't see it likely to gain any wider support, and
provides quite obvious interoperability issues.

Regards
Henrik Nordström
Squid Hacker

tasos wrote:
>
> Therefore, if there was a convention for a special "tag" in the HTTP request
> to accept such QUOTEs, Squid would suddenly become a full-featured (sort of)
> FTP proxy. Is this such a bad idea? Or is it the type of thing that should be
> approved by W3? Information on FTP proxying has never crossed my way, but I
> do setup the ftp_proxy variable=http://... , so I can guess what goes on. I
> cannot even see why an HTTP proxy should provide FTP proxy services - perhaps
> I need to find a searchable archive of this list. It is of course VERY
> convenient; if only we could get the QUOTE thing going as well...
>
> Thanks for the answer Henrik,
Received on Thu Oct 04 2001 - 14:01:46 MDT