Censornet - internet filtering on your terms

Misbehaving webservers

Published in CensorNet Professional on January 08, 2010 by Administrator

We've recently had reports of a couple of sites that have been timing out when accessed through CensorNet. 999 times out of 1000, when this happens, there's a simple cause within your CensorNet policy setup, however occasionally there's more to it than that. In these cases, even adding the URL to the filter bypass cannot get the pages to download. Instead, all that they get is an "Upstream proxy did not respond in time" message. The reason for this is a misbehaving webserver at the remote end. The brief explanation is that the remote end (ie the website) isn't playing nicely with the proxy information being sent from the CensorNet server. What happens is that instead of closing one connection, and continuing loading the page, the remote site is waiting for CensorNet to close the connection. Which makes no sense. It would be like expecting a user to hit "Stop" when loading a webpage when they think the remote server has finished sending them all the information they need. The only solution is to add the URL to the client browser's "Do not use proxy for" URL list. For a more technical explanation, please read http://wiki.censornet.com/foswiki/bin/view/Main/SitesTimeOutEvenIfTheyAreInTheFilterBypass