It would be nice if the proxy types HTTP and HTTPS could be added.
/Simon
/Simon
more proxies
Posted by Simon on Sun 27 Jul 2003 05:52 AM — 4 posts, 17,889 views.
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:
Basically the format is:
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:
Problem 2
Web servers tend to be "connectionless" - that is - normally when talking to a web server a browser does this:
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).
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).
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.
Well, if it can't be done then there's nothing to it :) Thanks for the answer.
It can be done on some proxies. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2817.txt, which defines the http CONNECT method.