'Active Imaging Webcast'

Hey all,

I've just run across something interesting - a site called
'www.netoptions.com', who appear to be selling hosting services to porno
sites. Amongst the services they offer is video streaming. This seems
to be done in an interesting way - the request that triggers the video
looks like a normal web request, and the resulting stream seems to come
back as a normal file - with the content-type set as a multipart file,
each part being a jpg in it's own right. It appears if you sit on one of
these, it just keeps tacking new jpg's into the stream - thus creating one
ultra-huge file, size limited only by boredom threshold of viewer.

Obviously, this does bad things to caches.

I'm trying to think of nice ways to deal with files that get way too
large - in this case, the file goes over some internal limit, and gets
pushed out to disk (rather that than try to hold it in memory). When the
unfortunate spool the file landed on runs out of space, squid of course
chucks a wobbly.

The only 'real' solution I can think of is, instead of dumping files to
disk if they go over a certain size, start dropping the front of the
file, to keep it at a reasonably fixed size. I doubt this will work very
effectively though - especially where there's a speed differential between
client-proxy and proxy-server.

Anyone got any other ideas?

KevinL
(The subject line is the server type pushing this stuff, btw)

--------------- qnevhf@obsu.arg.nh ---------------
Kevin Littlejohn,
Development Engineer, Connect.com.au
----------- Oernxf guvatf sbe n yvivat -----------
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:54 MDT