iBurst Transparent Proxy

R

regardtv

Expert Member
Joined
Sep 1, 2003
Messages
1,537
Reaction score
1
Location
Gauteng, South Africa
Hello All

I've noticed over the past few weeks that iBurst's transparent proxy comes and goes ... but in general when it's in use browsing sucks.

Has anyone else noticed this ?

Your experiences & comments ?

R
 
they probably believed the sales person for linux when they said "you can run this on a 486x machine with 3 meg of ram" and thought "boy, we'll save a ****load of money!"
 
Hi Regardtv

The only time I know for sure that WBS' Transparent Proxy is in place is when I get a failure/timeout message from it - I think the last times were on Thursday & Friday.

Apart from that, hard to say if their transparent proxy actually slows things down since I'm already used to the inconsistencies of the iBurst experience...:(

Have WBS been turning their Transparent Proxy on & off, how does one know when it is off? [I know LSM shows when it is on but I am conserving bandwidth & not running LSM anymore...]
 
they do have a cache proxy but from what I hear its pretty jacked up and can store terrabytes of storage
 
The easiest way to test for the existence of a transparent proxy is to add a fake hosts entry into your \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.

Code: 
199.99.99.99 no.where

Then, point your browser at http://no.where

If you get a friendly little proxy error such as this:
Code: 
Bad Gateway
The following error occurred:

[code=DNS_HOST_NOT_FOUND] The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is not found by retrying the URL.
Please contact the administrator.
Then you probably have a netcache Appliance between you and the rest of the http world. Another way is to check with Firefox's Web developer plugin under: Tools->Web Developer->Information->View Response Headers.

Transparent proxies are required, by RFC, to add a "Via:" header to the response, e.g:
Code: 
Date: Sun, 01 May 2005 17:15:40 GMT
Content-Length: 338
Content-Type: text/html
Server: NetCache appliance (NetApp/5.5R6D29)
[b]Via: 1.1 ndf-cache1 (NetCache NetApp/5.5R6D27)[/b]

Of course, some caches don't divulge this information, in which case the fake hosts entry is an almost sure fire way to detect it.
 
:cool: thanks TheRoDent, I will remember that - it is actually common sense, but I never even thought of doing it :o.

I know/remember that WBS' iBurst Poxy is Squid...
 
yea, and very soon, TheRodent will be my bitch on UT2004..... i'll own youz on ADSL :D
 
DaveBuchanan1337 said:
can anyone explain how a transparent proxy works? I refuse to google on mayday.
Click to expand...

to put this simplistically - it basically sits in line with a net connection, and keeps copies of all http and ftpp traffic that passes through it. if the same page is requested more than once, it serves it from the local copy instead of fetching it from the net. it basically saves on onward bandwidth, so turining it off would result in more congestion of international bandwidth, subsequnetly slowing you down.
 
yeah, I had the hostnames for them before, I think I was on cache-01.jhb.wbs.co.za 196.30.31.242
 
slimothy said:
yeah, I had the hostnames for them before, I think I was on cache-01.jhb.wbs.co.za 196.30.31.242
Click to expand...

straight up dude. notice the legal ip address though...
been wondering if they are using any compression devices on their wan. u know slim? it could account for the erratic latency people are experiencing...
 
I have absolutley no clue as to thier innerworkigns other than what i was told which is they use terrabytes of storage.

I did notice soemthign funny today though, when switching on my firewall after a few days without it I did a live update and the 12MB update flew down i think I calculated it at 180KB/s (nortons doesn't actually tell you) but it was way faster than normal, any one know if they cache those requests?
 
nortons will be cached cos its straight ftp requests....
with regards to the compression devices - i no longer have my "demo" iburst stuff, and forgot to test compression on their network. Do you notice any difference in download speeds when you are downloading a "compressed" file like a zip file? thats normally a tell tale sign that they are compressing wan links...
 
If they have a proxy then shouldn't they be telling us to set the proxy in our browers ect?
 
seburn said:
If they have a proxy then shouldn't they be telling us to set the proxy in our browers ect?
Click to expand...
It is a "Transparent Proxy", you have to use it - you have no choice, you also cannot disable it or bypass it - at least not for http, ftp ;).
 
I c -lol so i won't phone and ask for proxy settings coz that would be pointless.

Thx
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X