this addition follow:
The patch implements a simple reverse proxy (with one funky extra
feature). It has all the regular features: mapping remote servers to local
namespace (ReversePath), disabling forward proxying (ReverseOnly) and HTTP
redirect rewriting (ReverseBaseURL).
The funky feature is this: You map Google to /google/ and the Google front
page opens up fine. Type in stuff and click "Google Search" and you'll get
an error from tinyproxy. Reason for this is that Google's form submits to
"/search" which unfortunately bypasses our /google/ mapping (if they'd
submit to "search" without the slash it would have worked ok). Turn on
ReverseMagic and it starts working....
ReverseMagic "hijacks" one cookie which it sends to the client browser.
This cookie contains the current reverse proxy path mapping (in the above
case /google/) so that even if the site uses absolute links the reverse
proxy still knows where to map the request.
And yes, it works. No, I've never seen this done before - I couldn't find
_any_ working OSS reverse proxies, and the commercial ones I've seen try
to parse the page and fix all links (in the above case changing "/search"
to "/google/search"). The problem with modifying the html is that it might
not be parsable (very common) or it might be encoded so that the proxy
can't read it (mod_gzip or likes).
Hope you like that patch. One caveat - I haven't coded with C in like
three years so my code might be a bit messy.... There shouldn't be any
security problems thou, but you never know. I did all the stuff out of my
memory without reading any RFC's, but I tested everything with Moz, Konq,
IE6, Links and Lynx and they all worked fine.
0a8e4e4d8d