Unable to test HTTP PUT-based file upload via Squid Proxy

Question

I can upload a file to my Apache web server using Curl just fine:

echo "[$(date)] file contents." | curl -T - http://WEB-SERVER/upload/sample.put 

However, if I put a Squid proxy server in between, then I am not able to:

echo "[$(date)] file contents." | curl -x http://SQUID-PROXY:3128 -T - http://WEB-SERVER/upload/sample.put 

Curl reports the following error:

Note: This error response was in HTML format, but I've removed the tags for ease of reading.

ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL:
http://WEB-SERVER/upload/sample.put

The following error was encountered:
Unsupported Request Method and Protocol

Squid does not support all request methods for all access protocols.
For example, you can not POST a Gopher request.
Your cache administrator is root. 

My squid.conf doesn't seem to be having any ACL/rule that should disallow based on the src or dst IP addresses, or the protocol, or the HTTP method... as I can do an HTTP POST just fine between the same client and the web server, with the same proxy sitting in between.

In case of the failing HTTP PUT case, to see the request and response traffic that was actually occurring, I placed a netcat process in between Curl and Squid, and this is what I saw:

Request:

PUT http://WEB-SERVER/upload/sample.put HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.15.5 (i686-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8b zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.5
Host: WEB-SERVER
Pragma: no-cache
Accept: */*
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Expect: 100-continue

Response:

HTTP/1.0 501 Not Implemented
Server: squid/2.6.STABLE21
Date: Sun, 13 May 2012 02:11:39 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1078
Expires: Sun, 13 May 2012 02:11:39 GMT
X-Squid-Error: ERR_UNSUP_REQ 0
X-Cache: MISS from SQUID-PROXY-FQDN
X-Cache-Lookup: NONE from SQUID-PROXY-FQDN:3128
Via: 1.0 SQUID-PROXY-FQDN:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE21)
Proxy-Connection: close

<SNIPPED the HTML error response already shown earlier above>

Note: I have anonymized the IP addresses and server names throughout for readability reasons.

Answer 1

Thanks to Amos Jeffries for answering this on squid-users forum. The issue is basically that Squid before version 3.1 does not implement HTTP 1.1 and thus rejects the chunked transfer encoding.