Re: Alt-Svc + Proxy Pac

[Ryan Hamilton <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Patrick McManus <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Ryan Hamilton <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Consider the following scenario. There are two servers,
>> internal.example.com and external.example.com. Inside the enterprise
>> access to resources outside the firewall must go through a proxy, whereas
>> resource inside the firewall can go direct. That would lead to a .pac file
>> like:
>>
>> function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {​
>>
>> ​  if (host == "internal.example.com") {
>>     return "DIRECT";
>>   }
>>   return "PROXY proxy.example.com";
>> }​
>>
>>
>> If Alt-Svc for internal says, "Alt-Svc: h2="external.exmple.com:443",
>> then ​the proxy will say, "Sure, go direct to
>> http://internal.example.com/" but then the browser will connect to
>> external.example.com:443 and will avoid the proxy and the request will
>> hang. This seems a bit unfortunate, but it's not clear that the alternative
>> is much better, so I'm happy to do this, if that's the consensus of the
>> group.
>>
>
>
> The browser is supposed to validate the alternate service (among other
> things by checking that it has a cert valid for the origin) before using it
> and fall back if it is unavailable. So it seems that
> external.example.com:443 could not be validated in your example and if
> perhaps that validation were stale, it should get automagically cleaned up.
>

​Agreed! When I said, "the request will hang", I meant to say, "the
connection will hang". You're totally right that this won't be a user
facing problem.​

​We won't use the alternative-service but it's not the end of the world.​
​

I would be very cautious about ever changing url based on alt-svc.. alt-svc
> does not change origins or urls. If it did, it would get very hard to
> reason about. but supplying the alt information explicitly seems a lot more
> interesting.
>

​Agreed.​


> Somebody should really write up a I-D for a modern PAC (that could be me,
> but realistically a lot of other things would have to come off the todo
> list first.)
>

​SGTM. Especially the part about you doing the work :>​