Considerations when Implementing JadeTcpIpProxy Class Features

When implementing features of the JadeTcpIpProxy class, consider the following issues.

• For HTTP proxy servers, NTLM and Basic authentication modes only are supported (that is, message digest is not supported).

  The degree of impact depends on the type of proxy server. Microsoft Proxy Server supports message digest authentication.

• HTTP-based proxy servers that implement redirection are not supported. You are more likely to use redirection if you are a large site or you have multiple proxies that are geographically distributed.

• The Internet Explorer (version 5.0 or higher) ability to automatically discover the location of proxy server configuration information is not implemented in any form.

• The Internet Explorer ability to check a destination server address to see if it is a "local address" that should optionally be excluded from using a proxy server is not supported. This may affect you if you are connecting locally to a server but you require a proxy to access sites on the Internet.

• The Web browser feature that excludes specific hosts, domains, or IP address ranges is not supported. This may affect you if you are connecting locally to a server but you require a proxy to access sites on the Internet.

• There is no ability to select between multiple available proxy servers based on the higher-level protocol that is being used or implemented by the TcpIpConnection object. The proxy server to use for File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transfers can be different from the proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, or Gopher.

• You cannot control the authentication method that the proxy object uses if the proxy server supports multiple authentication methods. The proxy server attempts authentication using the methods listed by the proxy server in the specified order, if it understands that authentication method.

• If the user name and password combination fails, the entire connection process fails. This requires the userName and password properties to be updated before the connection is retried.

  If both NTLM and Basic authentication are supported and the user is not allowed to connect through an NTLM-based authentication, JADE still tries NTLM authentication each time before it retries with Basic authentication, which could lead to a possible account lockout.

• The SOCKS_SERVER and /etc/socks.conf files are not supported.