Why doesn EZproxy recycle port numbers?
When running in its original “proxy by ports” configuration, EZproxy allocates ports to represent different web servers. As an example, EZproxy might assign port 2050 to represent www.somedb.com, 2051 to represent search.somedb.com, etc. As users access databases through these ports, various records are made of these port numbers. These occur not only in obvious places such as bookmarks, but also in more subtle locations such as web browser caches and Internet web server caches. When a browser requests a document, it often says “give me this page, unless it hasn’t been modified since this date that’s on a copy of the page I already have in cache.” If port 2050 represented www.somedb.com one day, but www.otherdb.com the next day, you can readily encounter an instance were the web page viewed by the user could contain elements from both company’s web servers (this effect was actually seen during early development of EZproxy, when this subtlety had yet to be realized).
