Re: Corrupted GIFs through proxy.

Henrik Frystyk (frystyk@bay.lcs.mit.edu)
Thu, 13 Oct 1994 23:22:54 +0100

Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 23:22:54 +0100
Message-Id: <9410131451.AA00452@bay.lcs.mit.edu>
From: frystyk@bay.lcs.mit.edu (Henrik Frystyk)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-proxy@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Corrupted GIFs through proxy.

The problem is well-known from other situations but I have not seen it
with gif-files. Its is due to the reaction of a 0.9 server when talking
to Mosaic (the TCP window gets filled up with no ACKs sent back). I have
explained the symptoms at the page

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Bugs.html

which I use to explain known bugs or eqivalent information. Currently
there is little to do as the HTTP protocol can't change the status code
on the fly.

The quick solution is - get a new server!

-- cheers --

Henrik Frystyk
frystyk@w3.org
+ 41 22 767 8265
World-Wide Web Project,
CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23,
Switzerland

> When I connect via the proxy to certain web servers, gif files
> transmitted by the foreign server get corrupted when passing
> through the proxy. They display as mostly black. As I say, this
> only occurs with a small subset of web servers. Has anyone else
> run across this symptom? As an example of what I mean, check out
> the web server at http://mail.border.com/ - of course, only try this
> out if you are running through the cern proxy - it displays OK
> if you're not running through the proxy. I'm trying to figure
> out if the problem is with the proxy, or the server...