Shibboleth Developers

["Scott Cantor" <>]

> The second IP address (72.14.194.26) is one used by Google's Web  
> Accelerator (http://webaccelerator.google.com/).  I'm still waiting  
> to hear back from the client to see if disabling GWA solved his  
> problem, but I'm fairly certain that it will.  As a long term  
> solution however, I'm wondering if Shibboleth should block these and  
> other "prefetching" requests.

My inclination would be to say that it's the web server's job to block that,
not Shibboleth's. Sort of like with spiders. At some point you have to draw
a line somewhere...

> More information at (http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/ 
> google_web_accelerator_hey_not_so_fast_an_alert_for_web_app_de
> signers.php)

That doesn't fill me with confidence. The X-Moz header is unofficial and is
just something Mozilla cooked up to signal that their browser engine was
prefetching, so it's not really a google thing.

That link also says that the GWA is a client-side plugin. If that were true,
the IP address would match, so obviously it's not. Seems like google is
mis-using that header a little bit...probably a User-Agent check would make
more sense here...

-- Scott