Forum OpenACS Q&A: Using AOLserver as a proxy server

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1: Using AOLserver as a proxy server
Posted by Dan Mascenik on 03/10/03 05:35 PM
I'm looking for a way to make AOLserver proxy requests for certain binary files to another server behind a firewall.  _ns_http_read doesn't seem to handle binary data very well, and I would also rather not store data in a buffer before returning it the way util_httpget does.

Has anyone had any luck just piping the data stream (mime type and all) from an HTTP GET straight to the connection?

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2: Re: Using AOLserver as a proxy server (response to 1)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 03/10/03 05:59 PM

You can take a look at tclvhr for examples. The only problem I have encountered with this proxy is that you get error messages in your log if a user interrupts a download. In other words, this proxy doesn't do any checking if the client is still connected. Otherwise it works pretty fast. You could probably use ns_cache or something similar fairly easily.

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3: Re: Using AOLserver as a proxy server (response to 1)
Posted by Dan Mascenik on 03/10/03 08:32 PM
ns_writefp was the command I was looking for. This does exactly what I wanted in that it streams data from some foreign server to the connection: 
set conn [ns_httpopen GET $some_arbitrary_URL {} 30]
set read_desc [lindex $conn 0]
set write_desc [lindex $conn 1]
set headers [lindex $conn 2]

set mime_type [ns_set get $headers content-type]

set head "HTTP/1.0 200 OK
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: $mime_type\r\n\r\n"
# Plus any more headers you need.

ns_write $head
ns_startcontent -type $mime_type    
ns_writefp $read_desc

Thanks again, Tom!