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more proxies

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Posted by

Simon Sweden (39 posts) Bio

Date

Sun 27 Jul 2003 05:52 AM (UTC)

Message

It would be nice if the proxy types HTTP and HTTPS could be added.

/Simon

- "Where do you live, Simon?"
- "I live in the sick and wounded, doc."
Session 9

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Posted by Nick Gammon Australia (23,173 posts) Bio Forum Administrator

Date Reply #1 on Sun 27 Jul 2003 11:11 PM (UTC)

Message

I think I know what you are trying to do - you want to play a MUD in a place that only allows access to HTTP connections. However the problem is that HTTP proxies are designed for web pages (HTTP protocol) not straight telnet protocol.

Problem 1

A proxy expects to see something like this:


GET http://www.somehost.com/path/file.html HTTP/1.0
From: someuser@somewhere.com
User-Agent: HTTPTool/1.0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 32
[blank line here]

home=Australia&favorite+flavor=chocolate

Basically the format is:

Header lines
A blank line
Form data (ie. for a POST form)

The proxy would establish a connetion to www.somehost.com (in this example) and then send the rest of the data to it (including the headers). When it got a response it would forward it back to the web browser.

If you tried doing this to a MUD, you can imagine that the MUD would not respond too well to all this stuff:


From: someuser@somewhere.com
User-Agent: HTTPTool/1.0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 32

Problem 2

Web servers tend to be "connectionless" - that is - normally when talking to a web server a browser does this:

Make a connection
Send the HTTP request (see above example)
Get a response
Close the connection

See the problem? It gets a single response and disconnects. Now obviously this isn't going to work too well for a MUD session, which is supposed to be connected for hours.

I know there is thing called persistent connections, but I still doubt this will work properly because of the headers described above.

Problem 3

Some HTTP proxies also cache requests, which means that if they see what seems to be the same request twice they may simply return a copy of the previous response, rather than sending the request all the way back to the server.

Problem 4

Some HTTP proxies may be designed to block certain sites, or to parse the contents of the request, or response, for inappropriate content. If the data coming back from the web server does not like like HTML it may be discarded.

Conclusion

For technical reasons, therefore, I don't think HTTP proxies will work with a MUD server. I might be wrong, let me know if you know of a MUD client that offers it. I notice, for instance, that zMUD only offers SOCKS proxying (like MUSHclient).

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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Posted by

Simon Sweden (39 posts) Bio

Date

Reply #2 on Tue 12 Aug 2003 01:18 PM (UTC)

Message

Hmm, I was just thinking that ICQ(as an example) can use HTTP / HTTPS proxies but I have no idea how those proxies/protocols works so I'm out in deep waters :P

Well, if it can't be done then there's nothing to it :) Thanks for the answer.

- "Where do you live, Simon?"
- "I live in the sick and wounded, doc."
Session 9

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Posted by

Orange United Kingdom (25 posts) Bio

Date

Reply #3 on Thu 14 Aug 2003 07:14 AM (UTC)

Message

It can be done on some proxies. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2817.txt, which defines the http CONNECT method.

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