[users@httpd] Default document nehavior

[Anthony Browne <aa...@mail.widernet.org>]

            We have a collection of mirrored web sites that we distribute to schools in developing countries where Internet access is limited or not available. I'm looking into different proxies that provide off-line browsing support to see if they can be used to let students type in a URI and if it's in the collection it will be served as if they were on the Internet. 

         I would like to know how Apache responds while in offline mode to a request for http://www.foo.com/ with no default page specified versus a request where the default page is included in the request as in http://www.foo.com/index.html. It would make sense to me that the second request would work if the resource was in the cache already. But say I use an address without specifying a file. Does Apache keep track of what files in it's cache are the default document for some address? 

         I understand that normally the web server is configured to serve certain pages as a default document or directory index page. When such a page does not exist in the requested directory path the server will respond with a directory listing or a directory listing denied. It seems to me that it would not be possible to define ahead of time what documents are to be served as default, if they exist, in an offline cache and that some other technique would need to be used. 

Thanks, 

Anthony 

 
 
 


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Re: [users@httpd] Default document nehavior

[Joshua Slive <js...@gmail.com>]

On Fri,  4 Mar 2005 14:17:49 -0500, Anthony Browne
<aa...@mail.widernet.org> wrote:
>            We have a collection of mirrored web sites that we distribute to schools in developing countries where Internet access is limited or not available. I'm looking into different proxies that provide off-line browsing support to see if they can be used to let students type in a URI and if it's in the collection it will be served as if they were on the Internet.
> 
>         I would like to know how Apache responds while in offline mode to a request for http://www.foo.com/ with no default page specified versus a request where the default page is included in the request as in http://www.foo.com/index.html. It would make sense to me that the second request would work if the resource was in the cache already. But say I use an address without specifying a file. Does Apache keep track of what files in it's cache are the default document for some address?
> 
>         I understand that normally the web server is configured to serve certain pages as a default document or directory index page. When such a page does not exist in the requested directory path the server will respond with a directory listing or a directory listing denied. It seems to me that it would not be possible to define ahead of time what documents are to be served as default, if they exist, in an offline cache and that some other technique would need to be used.

You've asked this question several times without getting a response,
so I'll try to give you the best one I can:

The apache httpd proxy has no concept of an "offline" mode.  It
expects to have full-time Internet access.  It will not work well in
the scenario you describe because it will frequently try to verify
that documents are current, even if they are in the cache.  And it
certainly won't do any index.html-type fudging, since this would
violate the HTTP standards.

You could probably use mod_proxy as the basis for a custom module that
would have these capabilities, but I don't know anyone working on such
a problem.

Joshua.

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