VERY persistent caching

[munrobasher]

Currently evaluating WinGate, primarily for it's www proxy. We've encountered incredibly persistent caching from www.thetrainline.com. When another user goes to www.thetrainline.com they see the details that I last entered, i.e. Macclesfield to Didcot on 28/04. If you then enter a different search (e.g. Sheffield to London) and hit search, you still get Macclesfield to Didcot. In fact, it's proving darn hard to get rid of Macclesfield to Didcot at all :-)

Hitting Ctrl-F5 appears to help for a short while but close and re-open IE and guess what, Macclesfield to Didcot is back!

Turn off the WinGate proxy and re-open www.thetrainline.com and the boxes are empty - as they should be.

Now, thetrainline.com has always been a bit weird when it comes to caching or maybe it's architechure. You can't have two windows open at the same time as they "share" the same details. For example, search on trains from macclesfield to didcot in one window and get some times. Open another window and search sheffield to london and get some times. Go back to the macclesfield to didcot window and hit "Show later trains" and you get the later trains for sheffield to london. So it certainly stores it's details in a very naughty way.

But I guess the question is, how do we resolve this with wingate? Is there someway to disable caching by the proxy server for certain domains?

We suspect that thetrainline actually records the IP address and port number in their database - this is the only way we can explain the things we are seeing.

Thanks, Rob.

[munrobasher]

Hmm, this is getting spooky :-) Now everyone's Google has changed into French. This is most likely because Catherine, our French employee, has done a search in French.

But the question is - how are her settings getting picked up by everyone else? Open www.google.com and it appears in French. Press Ctrl-F5 and it's back to English but close and re-open IE and it's back to French.

Is it because everyone is currently authenticating as a guest?

Thanks, Rob.

[Nev]

Hmm, this is getting spooky :-) Now everyone's Google has changed into French. This is most likely because Catherine, our French employee, has done a search in French.

But the question is - how are her settings getting picked up by everyone else? Open www.google.com and it appears in French. Press Ctrl-F5 and it's back to English but close and re-open IE and it's back to French.

Is it because everyone is currently authenticating as a guest?

Thanks, Rob.

Hi Rob,

Yes you can exclude servers from caching.

In the caching configuration, set 'What to cache' to say Not http url contains google, or turn of caching all together in Wingate.

Actually using proxies I don't have that error on Win XP, 2k3 etc and using Wingate 6.1.1, are you using the latest version for your trial, if not then I'd recommend it only.

As for client recognition, go into the system properties and add the user's and machines at least by assumption and IP address should sort it for you.

[adrien]

One other thing to check.

The "days before recheck..." settings in the cache determine the window of time that WinGate will ignore requests from clients for a fresh copy and instead deliver the cached one.

Try setting this to 0

Adrien

[munrobasher]

As you might have seen from other posts, I couldn't get the user database working on an Windows 2000 Server in an NT 4 domain. Therefore, I've built another NT 4 server which is a BDC. This allows the domain user database to import which in turn allowed me to enable NTLM authentication. So we'll watch it for a while longer to see if having authentication in place helps with caching. User's are now showing up with their real names.

Also, I've enabled multi-user IP addresses as we also use Citrix/Terminal Servers although the caching faults we saw were also on standalone PCs.

Bit of a steep learning curve with WinGate. There's so much in there that we're not going to be using (at least to start with) - we just want the www proxy functionality for now. WinGate still works out cheaper than Microsoft's ICA.

Cheers, Rob.

[adrien]

hi Rob

We don't do any per-user cache handling, it's all a single global cache, so I would still recommend setting those "time before recheck..." settings to 0.

It shouldn't be doing any caching of anything that had a querystring though (e.g. google searches...)

Regards

Adrien

[munrobasher]

It shouldn't be doing any caching of anything that had a querystring though (e.g. google searches...)

The two examples we've come across (www.google.com and www.thetrainline.com) won't probably have any querystrings in there. We've got another ~20 days in the trial so we can keep an eye on it and make the change you suggest if it occurs again.

Thanks, Rob.

[munrobasher]

Hmm the pilot is not going too well :-( We're getting multiple reports across the company of problems with web pages not working, old details being present. These are primarily Citrix users.

I was having problems posting here as well... I'm going to set the "Recheck on other files" to zero as well - should that effect ASPX pages?

Thanks, Rob.

[munrobasher]

I've set the time for recheck for both HTML and other documents to zero and now users are getting prompted for authentication...

Going to have to back Wingate out I think if this carries on :-(

Cheers, Rob.

PS. I got "Page not found" on trying to preview this. Turned recheck times back to original values and about to press Preview again. I'm now off Citrix and on my own PC which is running the WGIC and therefore doing authentication that way, not by NTLM on IE via proxy setting.

[munrobasher]

Yes, it worked from my PC but not from Citrix. Will log off Citrix and try again.

Rob.

[munrobasher]

Attempted to reply from Citrix with proxy server enabled in IE and it failed with "Page cannot be displayed". Just disabled proxy server and now have direct connection to internet from Citrix terminal server. Let's see if this works.

Cheers, Rob.

[munrobasher]

Yes, that worked. With Wingate www proxy disabled I'm able to post replies to this forum.

Turn IE proxy back on (and require NTLM authentication) and I'm unable to post. I can read the forum okay.

I'm sure I was able to post replies when the recheck period was 2 and 60 respectively. Will try again.

Regards, Rob.

[munrobasher]

Didn't make any difference - I'm unable to post a reply to this forum on a Windows 2003 Server running Citrix and terminal services with proxy setting set to VSERVER01 (WinGate) in properties. I've had to turn the proxy off to be able to post here.

I'm sure I could post yesterday using WinGate proxy but hang on - that was on the NT 4 install, this is on the Windows 2003 variant.

Hmm...

Rob.

[adrien]

Hi

Caching can mask some auth requirements, since clients get a cached copy pre-auth, or use their cached copy rather than requesting from the server which then would prompt for auth.

So it sounds like you have auth issues if you don't expect users to be prompted for auth.

Caching in WinGate however is completely unrelated to authentication. It's the way it's dealt with by the browser that can make things confusing.

Adrien

[munrobasher]

I'm running out of time today so I'm going to let things settle down for a few days. We currently have two WinGate proxy servers:

o VSERVER01 is a Windows 2000 server
o VSERVER10 is a Windows NT 4 server

We've switched backwards and forwards so much that I'm confused what was tried where :-) The Citrix terminal servers are currently configured to use VSERVER01 (Win2K) as the IE proxy and the WinGate WWW service is set-up so that everyone authenticates with NTLM. The recheck settings for both HTML and non-HTML are currently set to zero.


Cheers, Rob.

Hello

[munrobasher]

Darn, pressed submit too soon!

I'm running out of time today so I'm going to let things settle down for a few days. We currently have two WinGate proxy servers:

o VSERVER01 is a Windows 2000 server
o VSERVER10 is a Windows NT 4 server

We've switched backwards and forwards so much that I'm confused what was tried where :-) The Citrix terminal servers are currently configured to use VSERVER01 (Win2K) as the IE proxy and the WinGate WWW service is set-up so that everyone authenticates with NTLM. The recheck settings for both HTML and non-HTML are currently set to zero. The issues that are now still open are:

WebEx won't work - authenticates as guest and therefore won't work. Workaround is to turn off proxy temporarily. To be honest, we had problems with WebEx and Proxy 2 and that was one of the main reasons we're not using it. Maybe WGIC on Citrix will help but no time to try that right now.

I'm unable to submit or preview replies to this forum with proxy turned on. Have to turn it off. I'm sure this was working yesterday on the NT 4 version.

People were getting old cached files although I think setting recheck counts to zero (which I assume means always recheck) has helped a lot.

Cheers, Rob.