Re: Howto keep a redirect out of cache

Jonathan Vogt <jonathan-9Phq/[email protected]> writes:

> I sync wwwoffle at university and I have to authenticate myself first by 
> visiting any page in a webbrowser. My Request will be redirected to a login 
> page at https://welcome.uni-ulm.de/....
> Sometimes it happens that this redirect is fetch insteed of the page I wanted. 
> If that's the case I don't know how to get the real one because I'm stuck to 
> the welcome page. Even if I log in I will return to it.
> I tried to block that subdomain completly but it seems like it did have any 
> effect.
> 
> I put *://welcome.uni-ulm.de in the Don't Cache Section but it didn't do 
> anything.
> 
> My questions are,
> 
> how do I ignore this special redirect?
> how do I delete these wrongly cached pages from the cache without deleting it 
> all?
> Is there a way to identify a redirect? maybe even to a certain page?

In the OnlineOptions section of the configuration file you should
probably have the request-redirection option enabled.  This will stop
the redirection being cached by WWWOFFLE (actually it would force it
to be refetched next time).

[<URL-SPEC>] request-redirection = yes | no
        While online pages that redirect the client to another URL temporarily
        will be requested again. (default=no).  This option takes precedence
        over the request-changed and request-changed-once options.

There is another option in the DontGet section that does a similar
thing, but was intended for a slighty different purpose.  This is the
location-error option which will stop you being redirected to a site
that is in the DontGet section.  Unfortunately this won't work for you
because the location that you are redirected to is https and you do
need to visit the page to log in.

<URL-SPEC> location-error = yes | no
        When a URL reply contains a 'Location' header that redirects to a URL
        that is not got (specified in this section) then the reply is modified
        to be an error message instead (default=no).  This will stop ISP
        proxies from redirecting users to adverts if the advert URLs are
        in this section.

The fact that the redirection is to an https page makes the problem
worse.  You cannot specify that https pages are not to be cached or
fetched because WWWOFFLE always ignores https pages.

I think that for you the first of these two, the request-redirection
option is the one that you need.  This will need to apply to all pages
so you can just put 'request-redirection = yes' in the OnlineOptions
section.

-- 
Andrew.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew M. Bishop                             amb-Uxr6IM1mbv2TY6FTCsQk+9Bc4/[email protected]
                                      http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/

WWWOFFLE users page:
        http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/version-2.8/user.html