[squid-users] Why does WinXP send "OPTIONS"?

Steve,

1) OPTIONS is a WebDAV request. WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is an extension of HTTP (see WebDAV.org) that adds some extra methods to the HTTP methods (GET, POST) like OPTIONS, PROPFIND, etc. It allows a client to not only retrieve documents from the server, but also write back to the document and list the directory contents. Microsoft has integrated it into IE 6. The OPTION method asks the server what methods are supported by it. If there is no response, it won't use WebDAV but HTTP instead. That is exactly what IE 6 does.

2) no

3) no

So don't worry Steve, IE 6 sees that you don't have a WebDAV compliant server and stops bothering you with any WebDAV requests.

Regards,

Arjé Cahn

---------------------------------------------------------
Content Management Department
Hippo Webworks
Grasweg 35
1031 HW Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel +31 (0)20 6345173
Fax +31 (0)20 6345179
arje(at)hippo(dot)nl / www.hippo.nl

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Snyder [mailto:swsnyder@insightbb.com]
Sent: 15 October 2002 23:12
To: squid-users@squid-cache.org
Subject: [squid-users] Why does WinXP send "OPTIONS"?

Hello.

We have Squid 2.4S7 running on a Linux box with a diverse set of client
types. The single WinXP(SP1) machine, running IE v6.0(SP1), is causing
many instances of this type of log entry:

Sun Oct 13 14:17:40 2002.419 75 192.168.0.3 TCP_MISS/503 1106 OPTIONS
http://helios/ - NONE/- -

This is not seen with Win98 or Win2K clients, though they are using the
same version of IE as the WinXP box. Nor have I seen this with Mozilla
on Win98 and Win2K machines. I have to assume that this behavior is some
aspect of the WinXP networking rather than purely a browser issue.

I need a little education on this. Specifically:

1. What is the OPTIONS request used for?

2. Am I seeing a problem that needs to be addressed?

3. Can/should I be providing WinXP with more that just the proxy's URL in
"Internet Properties"?

I'm not seeing any functional problems in Squid's behavior as a proxy used
by this WinXP box. I'm just a little concerned because I havent seen
this before.

Any thoughts on this? Thanks.
Received on Wed Oct 16 2002 - 03:25:53 MDT