Re: [squid-users] throttling/blocking by user-agent?

On Sat, 2003-01-11 at 12:07, Dave A King wrote:
> I'm trying to track down the cause of an extremely weird problem that seems
> to occur most often at universities. I've got a custom client that
> communicates via HTTP, currently using wininet on the Windows platform.
> Customers have complained about slow transfer rates or complete inability to
> connect from 3 different campuses that i know of (John Hopkins, Washington
> State, and Northwestern). They can connect to the same URL just fine with
> IE or Netscape. No proxy settings are required for them to connect. After
> trying everything under the sun to troubleshoot this problem, eventually
> there were all sent a build of the client using the exact same user-agent
> string that IE6 uses. This fixed the problem
>
> What I'm wondering is if anyone knows of any transparent proxy server, Squid
> or otherwise, that has the ability to filter by user-agent and either
> throttle the transfer rate or completely block connections with certain
> user-agent strings. If you know of anything, I'd appreciate the
> information...

Squid certainly has this capacity. Whether it is in use at those
campuses, or any inbetween & transparent link is somewhat harder to
tell.

You might start by looking at the Via and X-Forwarded-For headers.

Rob

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