Re: Alteon and transparent proxy

John Taylor wrote:
 
> I'm currently working on the next Layer 4 software release (4.0) for
> the Alteon switches. Among other things (including Layer 3), I am
> adding the ability for the switch to perform the transparent proxy
> function that ipfilt and others currently provide for squid.

Both good and bad ;-)

The good part is that nothing special is needed at the Squid host, the
bad part is that HTTP requests without a Host: header can't be supported
unless Squid knows the real destination address. To support all HTTP
clients you need to pass the real destination address down to Squid
somehow when no Host: header is available.

> The frame arrives at the cache server on port 80. We've configured
> squid to "accelerate many origin servers using the Host header." I
> don't know Perl. Does someone have a redirector script that will do
> what we want? The one on the web site seems pretty weak. We want to
> accelerate ALL web servers.

No redirector is nessesary when running as a proxy (transparent or
non-transparent). It is only needed when running as a standard
accelerator for IP based servers to supporting requests without Host:
headers, or to do proxy redirection to local mirrors (and similar
rewritings).

The squid config for Host: based transparent proxying on a non-patched
1.1.X Squid is:
# requests without a Host: header goes to www.some.server
http_accel www.some.server 80
# requests with a Host: header goes to the intended destination
http_accel_uses_host_header on

---
Henrik Nordström
Sparetime Squid Hacker