Re: [squid-users] Transparent Proxy

From: Mark Elsen <mark.elsen@dont-contact.us>
Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2006 14:30:32 +0100

We make our users , use the proxy through proxy settings in the browser.
This is one of those cases where a seemingly good word , hides
a bad concept.
There are many caveats of transparant proxying :

   - Intercepting HTTP breaks TCP/IP standards because user agents
think they are talking directly to the origin server.
   - It causes path-MTU to fail. Possibly making the website not accessible.
   - As a result for instance on older IE versions ; "reload" did not
work as expected.
   - You can't use proxy authentication
   - You can't use IDENT lookups
   - Intercepting proxies are incompatible with IP filtering designed
to prevent address spoofing.
   - Clients are still expected to have full Internet DNS resolving
capabilities , when in certain Intranet/Firewalling setups , this
is not always wanted.
   - Related to above : because of transp. proxy setup : squid
connects to a site
which is down.HOWEVER , due to the transparant proxying setup. It gets
a connected state to the interceptor. The
end user may get wrong error messages or a browser, seemingly
doing nothing anymore.

M.
Received on Sat Jan 07 2006 - 06:30:33 MST

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