Re: [squid-users] Domains without "www." - Probably silly question ....

>>> On 11/01/2007 at 08:54, Jakob Curdes <jc@info-systems.de> wrote:
> ... maybe this is a dumb one but I do not see it. We recently
> introduced squid at a customer's site as forward proxy and he says
now
> his browsing behavior has changed. Previously, without proxy, he
could
> type in a domain without the "www" and get the content. Now if he
does
> the same, he gets a squid error. I made sure that for the domain in
> question a web server is active only for www.xyz.com , not for
xyz.com
> and no nameserver entries exist for xyz.com. So it seems that the
> Browser is doing some sort of rewriting that does not work when using
a
> proxy ?? Browser here is Firefox.
>
> Glad for any hint,

I suspect the browser is using the failed DNS lookup as an indication
xyz.com doesn't exist, at which point it tries www.xyz.com instead.
When going through a proxy, the browser doesn't need to do a DNS
lookup:
it just asks Squid 'please fetch xyz.com' - and it treats Squid's
error message differently to a DNS error.

Using a transparent proxy would avoid this, with a small performance
cost
(the browser would perform a DNS query as usual, find nothing, then
switch to www.xyz.com, not knowing the requests get intercepted by
Squid);
you could probably achieve a similar effect with a proxy auto-config
script, which might be 'cleaner' than implementing transparent
proxying.

James.
Received on Thu Jan 11 2007 - 02:28:21 MST