Re: WWWOFFLE & Debian apt
Hi,
> I noticed a problem with Debian's apt program and WWWOFFLE, when used
> as an HTTP proxy. It's either a problem in WWWOFFLE or in apt or in
> both. I need help in finding it. The weird thing is that it only
> happens when you combine apt and WWWOFFLE -- each works very well on
> its own.
> It looks like some minor screwup with buffering or something. Does
> anyone have any ideas?
WWWOFFLE does not support HTTP/1.1 very well. Actually it supports a
few items from it (like the proxy authentication), but the persistent
connection part is a kludge.
What should happen when a HTTP/1.1 request comes in with a keep-alive
persistent connection type is that WWWOFFLE removes the 'Connection:
keep-alive' field and replaces it with a 'Connection: close'. This
tells the server that we don't want a persistent connection and the
server should close the connection when it has finished sending. This
is the same as would happen if the server was an HTTP/1.0 server.
The reason that WWWOFFLE works this way is that it is designed so that
a new server process is forked off for each connection request. The
server reply is simply written to a file with no analysis of the
content. The processing is also designed with the knowledge that it
is run only once and as such may not be very cleanly written. To
handle persistent connections the proxy must monitor the server reply
to find the separators between pages and open separate files for them,
this is quite a fundamental design change and this is why it is not
implemented.
Given that WWWOFFLE does work with Netscape and other browsers when
HTTP/1.1 requests are sent it is possible that apt has the problem.
One way to get more information from WWWOFFLE is to run it with extra
debugging turned on.
wwwoffled -d 6 -c wwwoffle.conf
The level 6 debugging is the extra debugging level designed for
looking at just this type of problem. It will display the incoming
request from the client (apt), the outgoing request to the server and
the reply header from the server.
Try running apt with this debugging level and look at what debug
information you get.
Also run 'wwwoffle -o URL' when you are online and see what debug
information that this gives. Check if the file size this gets is
correct.
If you need more help analysing the debug output of WWWOFFLE send it
to me.
--
Andrew.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew M. Bishop amb@gedanken.demon.co.uk
http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/
WWWOFFLE Mailing lists now available, see the wwwoffle users page:
http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/version-2.4/user.html
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