canonical url encoding and myfamily.com

From: Jeff Sapp <jasapp(at)pelennor.net>
Date: Tue Jun 05 2001 - 15:44:22 EDT

Hey, we're using Apache/1.3.9 (from the Debian package) and mod_proxy.

I'm not sure how to tell what version of mod_proxy it is, but I found the following information in a file called "260libproxy.info".

LoadModule: proxy_module /usr/lib/apache/modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule: proxy_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/libproxy.so
Directives:

 ProxyRequests
 ProxyRemote
 ProxyPass
 ProxyPassReverse
 ProxyBlock
 ProxyVia
 CacheRoot
 CacheSize
 CacheGcInterval
 CacheMaxExpire
 CacheLastModifiedFactor
 CacheDefaultExpire
 NoCache
Description: Support for caching proxy service

We offer proxy service, and some of our
customers are having trouble accessing pictures on www.myfamily.com. It appears that their servers don't like dealing with the encoded characters. (I'd paste a real url, but you have to have a login to their site). As far as I can tell, both of these URLs should be legitimate and its a bug on their side.

www.myfamily.com/~foo.jpg works just fine www.myfamily.com/%7Efoo.jpg does not work (returns document contains no data)

My questions are:

Is encoding these characters part of the proxy's job? Is there an easy way to turn this off?
Is there any reason I shouldn't turn this off? (the browser sends it this way) Could I just add it to "allowed" characters list in proxy_util.c?

Thanks,
Jeff Received on Tue Jun 05 19:44:49 2001