On Sat, 5 Jul 2003, Ian Douglas wrote:
In particular I would firstly like to know if there is a way I can discover conclusively if the problem is indeed with NTL's WEB Cache or not, and secondly, if it is, if there is a way I can bypass this and access the real eBay pages directly.
Hi Ian,
Is the webcache a transparent one, our do you have to explicitly configure your webbrowser to use it. If it is a transparent one, ie NTL intercept all outbound data to port 80 and direct it thorough their cache, you could try the following...
telnet www.ebay.co.uk 80 HEAD http://www.ebay.co.uk HTTP/1.0
Then hit enter twice. If NTL's cache is transparent, you should get an output similar to that below...
HTTP/1.0 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 IISExport: This web site was exported using IIS Export v2.2 Content-Location: http://www.ebay.co.uk/index.html Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:05:44 GMT Content-Type: text/html Accept-Ranges: bytes Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 11:54:34 GMT ETag: "0397c33ec42c31:13346" Content-Length: 41168 X-Cache: MISS from gateway.glovercc.clara.co.uk Proxy-Connection: close
The X-Cache line is the important one. I am running my own Squid proxy at home, and I do sometimes have problems with DNS errors if my ADSL drops out whilst making a request. Sometimes the problem sorts itself, other times I have to restart squid.
If the cache is not transparent, you will not see the X-Cache line.
Hope that helps.
Chris