On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, John Hally wrote:

> One thing I'm not clear on is how DNS works in this scenario.  Does the
> remote client resolver resolve hosts, or does the browser just forward on
> the url to the proxy and the proxy does the lookup on behalf of the client?

As you speak of reverse proxying the normal way this is done is that the 
reverse proxy publishes a single (or a set of) "official" Internet web 
server name to the users. Then depending on what the user requests from 
this "official" server he gets forwarded to different web servers.

In such setup Squid can publish itself using https:// to the users, while 
using http:// to the web servers. Squid can also require authentication 
before forwarding the request, but it should be noted that there can only 
be one set of login/password in HTTP so if you have applications also 
requiring login via HTTP authentication (not cookie based forms 
authentication) then some careful thought is needed there..
 
> If this is the case, I would imagine that by setting your browser's proxy
> setting to the proxy address, and the proxy using the intranet DNS server,
> things would work without having to modify the intranet content.  Is this
> not the case?

That would work, except that you then need SSL support on all your 
Intranet servers if you want to use https://. Also it won't be a reverse 
proxy but just a standard proxy. One notable drawback is that users behind 
other proxies won't be able to use this service.

> I envision this:
> 
> setting up a squid proxy with two nics, one internally addressed, the other
> publicly addressed.

Yes.

> setting up the proxy to use the internal DNS servers for hostname
> resolution.

Yes.

> setting the proxy to only proxy for the internal domain (this way the remote
> client would have to disable using the proxy for internet access, and enable
> for intranet access. ?!?)

Yes.

> setting up some type of proxy authentication. (NTLM maybe)

I would advice to stay away from NTLM in this type of setup. Better to use
Basic authentication over https://.

> Basically I've been tasked to make this work, and need to know if it's
> feasible with squid.  If so making it work is the next step.

It is all possible, but not without difficulties.

The difficulties is not so much in configuring the reverse proxy as in 
getting the Intranet applications to play nicely with the new access 
method.

Regards
Henrik

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