Remove declaration of support for HTTP range requests

[jwoyame]

The problem

When a resource response includes an "Accept-Ranges" HTTP header, the proxy will forward this header to the client. The browser interprets this to mean that requests for partial content can be made on that resource. The browser may then perform a range request, using the "Range" header. For instance:

Range:bytes=32768-862445

When the proxy receives this request, it does not forward the desired range to the target server.

An example

When a PDF is requested through the proxy, the server will return the full content of the PDF file, but will include an Accept-Ranges header to indicate that partial data ranges can be requested. PDF viewers (Adobe / Chrome) will notice the header and perform a partial range request for the first 32k or so of the file. Since the proxy does not support these queries, the PDF download will hang.
http://serverfault.com/questions/61424/why-are-we-seeing-apache-206-partial-responses-for-pdf-downloads

The fix

The DotNet proxy has been modified so as to not to forward the "Accept-Range" header to the client.

Other solutions

A better solution would be to forward all request headers to the target server, with the exception of those set by the proxy script. It would be very similar to how the copyHeaders function works, but would operate on request headers instead of response headers. This would require changing the design of the script.

Here is an explanation for how the Accept-Ranges header works: http://benramsey.com/blog/2008/05/206-partial-content-and-range-requests/

[bsvensson]

Thanks @jwoyame for a great write-up.

Any chance you also tried the php and/or iis proxies?

Is this resource response (with range request) for an "ArcGIS for Server", or some other software?

[phpmaps]

I second that... nice write up. Thank you for the contribution. @jwoyame

[jwoyame]

It is a long write-up for one line of code ;)

Most, if not all modern Web servers should be returning an "Accepts-Ranges" header with their binary data responses. I can confirm that IIS 7.5 does. This is typically not an issue for the proxy, as range requests are usually made only for video files or other large content. However, I was trying to return PDF files generated by a geoprocessor, and Chrome will fail on this, as it uses a Range request to stream in the first few pages of PDF content. Eliminating the Accepts-Ranges forces Chrome to load the whole PDF.

I have unfortunately not looked at the PHP or Java versions, but if they are not forwarding the "Range" headers, then they have a similar issue.