Vendors Warned About Cache Setup

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September 02, 1998 (12:00 AM EDT)

By Lee Kimber,

Cache software vendors are warning customers to make sure they set up Web caches properly after an American ISP threatened to sue backbone provider Digex for installing an Inktomi cache server that allegedly disrupted Web commerce systems.

Gleim Publications, a customer of Florida Digital Turnpike, said its CyberCash transaction system refused to authenticate some requests from Gleim's server after Digex installed Inktomi's popular Traffic Server on its backbone.

The Inktomi Traffic Server intelligently stores, copies, and retrieves network documents, to help reduce traffic congestion and increase data access speeds over the Internet.

While Digex has been criticized for not giving its ISP customers sufficient warning of the alleged effects of the cache, Inktomi CTO Paul Gauthier said Web cache problems were understood and avoidable.

"There are standard remedies in use by Inktomi's Traffic Server customers and other users of transparent caching," said Gauthier.

The problems pose a potentially significant threat because transparent caching is proving wildly popular in Europe where U.S. vendors are keen to sell it as the next step up from the unsophisticated passive caches that have dominated attempts to speed Web traffic.

Inktomi is just one of a number of cache vendors that have come to the United Kingdom and Europe in the past six months to sell caches as a salve for bandwidth-challenged ISPs and businesses.

But even Inktomi's rivals dismissed charges that Traffic Server was faulty or that caching obstructed e-commerce. "The cache must have been misconfigured," said Kelly Herrel, CacheFlow vice president of marketing.

According to cache vendor Mirror Image, the misconfiguration may have been the cause of the problem, and the company said placing caches close to the edge of a local network was a more workable solution.

"The problem comes because the authentication is set up on a different port to the HTTP," said European sales director Ben Revill. "If you intercepted the subsequent authentication port, you may not have had the problem."