From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: Using privoxy as a dropin replacement for squid+a redirector failed at our site due to a number of browsers being configured with squid as an ftp proxy. Squid can handle URL's of the form ftp://site/path/file, where privoxy fails, attempting to access http://ftp://site/path/file, and failing the DNS resolution of 'ftp' Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Setup privoxy 2.Add the privoxy setup to the browser for http and ftp access 3.Attempt to follow an ftp:// link Actual Results: Privoxy failed to access the ftp:// URL with a DNS failure Expected Results: Privoxy could have complained that it cannot process ftp:// URL's (or gained support for the ftp:// method), possibly with a hint about proxy settings. Additional info: Easy workaround by removing the indirection for ftp requests, but it's a pain for novice users who are misled by a DNS related error message.
There is an existing privoxy bug report/feature request for better error messaging. The fact that ftp proxying does not work, is a FAQ: 5.5. I cannot connect to any FTP sites. Privoxy seems to be blocking me. Privoxy cannot act as a proxy for FTP traffic, so do not configure your browser to use Privoxy as an FTP proxy. The same is true for any protocol other than HTTP or HTTPS. Most browsers understand FTP as well as HTTP. If you connect to a site, with a URL like ftp://ftp.example.com, your browser is making an FTP connection, and not a HTTP connection. So while your browser may speak FTP, Privoxy does not, and cannot proxy such traffic. ============= It is highly unlikely that ftp support will be added anytime soon, if ever.
Hal: Many companies/users use squid to cache www-pages AND smaller FTP-downloads or just FTP directory information. If you chain squid with privoxy as mentioned in the user-manual (browser->squid->privoxy), you can't cache FTP-downloads anymore. I've tested the workaround for FTP/squid from the user-manual, unfortunately it doesn't work: cache_peer 127.0.0.1 parent 8118 7 no-query acl ftp proto FTP always_direct allow ftp never_direct allow all