I'll leach this thread to reiterate an amusing problem I've had 
(actually, a friend of mine at work) with transparent proxies.

I'll give you the rundown after investigation. We both read the 
Userfriendly comic strip (http://www.userfriendly.org/static). Their 
site uses Apache with mod_gzip installed. I use mozilla, that tells the 
server (and in their case, also gets) that it supports gzip encoding of 
the content. It appears that NetCache (I don't know where it's 
installed, either my work or the work's ISP) caches the content as it 
arrives!

When my friend tries to access the same URL with IE 5.5, IE puts up a 
dialog asking to save the page. Saving it as index.gz, opening it to 
index.html, and loading in IE gives the complete page, but you cannot 
view the page directly. You cannot even get to the point where pressing 
CTRL+F5 in IE reissues the same request with "no-cache".

Inspecting the raw connection, it is obvious that IE sends no 
"allowed-encoding" headers, and receives "Content-encoding: gzip", which 
is totally incompatible with the HTTP RFC. It goes without saying that 
Mozilla has no problem getting the content from the proxy, as it sends 
it requests with "Allowed-encoding: gzip, deflate", and the resulting 
communication is valid (the reply looks the same as in the IE case).

This is not stricly relevant, as this is a proxy bug, but it shows that 
transparent proxies sometimes present you with bugs that are not trivial 
to bypass, even if they are proxy bugs, and can and should be fixed.

                    Shachar




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