[GLLUG] Proxies with WPA

[Marr]

On Sunday 09 January 2011 19:42:56 Richard Houser wrote:
> Just guessing, but could Privoxy be configured to cache the failures
> somehow, like negative dns queries?

Thanks for the suggestion, Richard. In a way, that sounded quite plausible to 
me, so I did a search on the Privoxy configuration files for anything related to 
"DNS" or "cach" (to find "cache" and "caching") but I see no relevant options 
or information. So, if DNS caching is somehow the issue, it looks like 
something I have no control over.

I then searched the Internet and found this "Toubleshooting" page:

   http://www.privoxy.org/faq/trouble.html

Included is this interesting bit:

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5.17. I am getting too many DNS errors like "404 No Such Domain". Why can't 
Privoxy do this better?

There are potentially several factors here. First of all, the DNS resolution 
is done by the underlying operating system -- not Privoxy itself. Privoxy 
merely initiates the process and hands it off, and then later reports whatever 
the outcome was and tries to give a coherent message if there seems to be a 
problem. 

   .
   .
   .

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If Chick is getting 404 errors like I was, I think the above text implies that 
it's not a result of Privoxy doing anything unfortunate with DNS. But I'm 
certainly no expert on all this, so I could be quite wrong.

I wish I could put my finger on it. I suspect Chick's problem and my problem 
are closely related if not the same. I think I'll have to enable detailed 
logging in Privoxy at some point and try to duplicate the problem.

Thanks again for the suggestion. Even if that doesn't turn out to be the 
issue, it's stimulating my thinking about this.

Regards,
Bill