[Gllug] Proxy awareness campaign

[Jake Jellinek]

--On 18 October 2001 01:19 +0100
--gllug at uncertainty.org.uk apparently said about the subject "Re: [Gllug] 
Proxy awareness campaign":

> On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 09:37:01AM +0100, Jake Jellinek wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I think someone (preferably someone who has a little more time than I
>> do,  although I would be interested in helping or perhaps even
>> sponsoring it)  should start up a Proxy Awareness Campaign.
>
> been done  ...
>
> http://vancouver-webpages.com/CacheNow/
>

Hmm, same name, different perspective/idea :)

They want to increase use of proxies, which my concept of an awareness 
campaign did not have on it's agenda. "CacheNow" is an appropriate name, 
but is a little more than simple awareness.

If I do start up a web site (probably the first step) about proxy 
awareness, it will present both sides of the argument. I'm thinking 
actually that "campaign" is probably too strong an idea also intially, the 
awareness aspect is what I really care about most.

As people have said, knowing about transparent proxies, knowing about why 
proxies are good, and why and when they can cause problems is the important 
thing, and giving people the choice whether they want to use one or not. I 
like the idea of listing UK ISP's current proxy and caching policies, and 
in some way allowing visitors to the site to rate them or highlight recent 
problems.


>>
>> As a web hosting company we have nightmares supporting our customers
>> because of broken proxies. The transparent ones are the worst of course.
>> The issues are varied, including yesterday many of our customers using
>> BT  telling us they were seeing versions of their sites 6 months old
>> appearing  in their browsers. (No doubt some sort of dodgy backup
>> restore gone wrong  on the BT proxy).
>>
>
> I find the best way to convince people if a proxy is cauising problems
> is to get them to add some junk to the query string - this makes the
> page look new and it will be retrieved correctly (almost always)
>
> you can do this best when emailing a client www.yoursite.com?new=1
>

Sure, there are a few ways of convincing people, but it seems we have to do 
this more and more often, and for some people it still appears that we are 
trying to fool them with some sort of technical wizardry and make excuses. 
Proxy issues also mean that we often spend time trying to diagnose 
"intermittent" problems which we may not always immediately think of as 
proxy ones. An awareness web site should then also show some of the ways a 
proxy problem may rear it's head...to list a few now that we've seen fairly 
regularly:-

1) Complete denial of access to site (just hangs waiting)
2) Forbidden or other error message in place of site
3) Extra header text or control code characters appearing within the site 
content
4) Completely wrong site appears in browser
5) Mixture of two sites! (yep really has happened) images and portions of 
one site mixed with pages and portions of another.
6) Old versions of pages appearing.
7) Recent changes not showing
8) Images only half loading
9) Variable loading times of page compenents within a single page
10) Cached output of dynamic pages appearing

Anyone care to add any?

> transparent proxies can often be made untransparent by telling the
> browser about them - of course you have to know about proxies to do
> this.
>
> basically I'm a fan of proxies, I run my own and feed that from my
> isp's - this way I get a fast connection (and filter out junk)
>
> I don't like transparent proxies but I can see why people do it.

When you see transparent things though, they aren't so transparent any more 
:) Awareness helps with this!

Cheers,

Jake.


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug