web cache and remote access

[tibor at lib.uaa.alaska.edu]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2000 Drew, Bill" <drewwe at morrisville.EDU> wrote:

> > Caches are a *good thing*  in my opinion.  Rather than fight against
> >them I'd suggest you need to look into other types of authentication.
> 
> I agree caches are good for better response times but as Thomas Dowling
> stated they should be able to handle traffic from library databases and
> other such items without causing any problems.

Hmmm... there seems to be much confusion on this.  There are actually
*two* issues here--caching and proxying.  Caching for the most part
doesn't cause problems, saves bandwidth, and generally improves
performance.

However, proxying can cause problems with IP based authentication, because
the remote webserver sees the http request coming from the IP of the
proxy, not the IP of the computer running the browser.  The fact that most
proxies also do caching seems to have been confusing things a bit.

Mike
--
Mike Tibor         Univ. of Alaska Anchorage    (907) 786-1001 voice
Network Technician     Consortium Library         (907) 786-6050 fax
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