Why does an NTLM proxy require persistant connections?

[Dawit Alemayehu]

On Thursday 29 December 2005 10:47, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> And why doesn't it warn or give sensible errors when that setting is off?

How do you want it to do that ?!?!?!?

> Firefox worked out of the box, but it took me a look at the KIO-HTTP
> sources before I noticed that NTLM won't work without persistant
> connections. Without that you don't even get the dialog that prompts for a
> password, the entire NLTM code path is skipped and instead authentication
> obviously fails at the proxy. (Exactly identical result to using non-NTLM
> enabled clients like lynx or older KDEs on that proxy.)

Do about:config in firefox, filter with the word 'proxy' and see what the 
default value for proxy keepalive is... What we need to do is default 
persistent proxy connection to on and let people who use broken servers such 
as Junkbuster turn that option off since they seem to be in the minority now. 
When this feature was implemented the majority of proxy server common on unix 
platforms were still HTTP/1.0 based. That should fix this issue...

> Why isn't persistancy automatically turned on when NTLM is detected? What
> does it do at all?

Because it is something the person who added NTLM support overlooked or did 
not anticipate ??? IOW you found a bug

> As with my previous mail, I am only sitting here tomorrow and then I can't
> test anymore. If preferred I can open a bug report for tracking purposes
> though.

This should have been tested by whomever implemented/added support for this 
authentication scheme. Anyways, I will try to setup my Squid with NTLM 
support and test this when I get the chance...

-- 
Regards,
Dawit A.
"Practice what you preach, preach what you practice"