POST with Connection: keep-alive

I found an interesting problem with squid when submitting a form on a server
running NCSA httpd 1.4.2.

The client (netscape 4.5) submitted a POST HTTP/1.0 request with the header:

Referer: http://www.camcnty.gov.uk/sub/cambserv/pipemail.htm
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.34 i686)
Host: www.camcnty.gov.uk
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 86

and when squid forwarded it on, the request became:

POST /cgi-bin/con1_form HTTP/1.0
Referer: http://www.camcnty.gov.uk/sub/cambserv/pipemail.htm
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.34 i686)
Host: www.camcnty.gov.uk
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 86
Via: 1.0 webcache.cygnus.co.uk:3128 (Squid/2.1.PATCH1)
X-Forwarded-For: 194.130.39.29
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Connection: keep-alive

The final line is the interesting one. For a POST request, what use would a
keep-alive have? Why should squid send this?

The thing is that even after 86 characters (the Content-Length) have been
sent, the httpd doesn't return a reply. If I remove the "Connection:
keep-alive", things work as expected.

So whose fault is it? Squid or the NCSA httpd? Probably the latter. But is
POST a useful thing to use with keep-alive anyway? RFC 2068 hardly mentions
keep-alive at all, except in 19.7.1 in the context of backwards
compatibility.

I've got the debug output available if anyone wants other info. The NCSA
server isn't mine, so I can't look at it.

TTFN,

Jifl

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