HTTP error 511 [Was: Secure (https) proxy authentification]

["Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net>]

Le Dim 19 février 2012 11:22, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :

> 511 is exactly what I need. I was not aware of it. Is it simplemented in any
> browser yet? Where should I point the browser writers to get it implemented?
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-nottingham-http-new-status-04.txt ?

I take that back. 511 is almost exactly what we need. However, when I pointed
the authors of some of the tools that pass through our proxy to it (curl, git)
they told me they could not parse html code in their tools, so they really
need a location (or similar) field containing the address of the
authentication portal to communicate it to the user. Without this field, they
can only stop with 'Network authentication is needed' instead of 'Please open
<url> in your browser to proceed'.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/191085
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/191087
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/191086

(the nearest thing there is in the spec is the url in meta, but it's only in
the example, not mandatory, and no one will write code for something they can
not be sure will exist)

We'd like to support those tools properly as their users' previous clumsy
attempts to navigate our current non-standard redirection method resulted in
internal security investigations.

It is a problem in our setup as we only block some URLs (others are allowed
transparently without auth), and we use several proxy farms in different
physical sites (to avoid spofs). So just opening any url in a browser won't
trigger an authentication request (the url may not be blocked, or the browser
may pass through a gateway where the user IP is already authorized, while
git/etc tried to access through another one).

Could you please revise the error 511 definition to add such a field ?

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot