[Please CC: me on reply, I'm not subscribed to the list.] Hi,
sometimes there seems to be a problem with the interoperation of the web browser retawq (<http://retawq.sourceforge.net/>) and the Apache httpd - the httpd sends a redirection response pointing back to the original request URI, which would cause an infinite loop of redirections. For illustration, here are two request/response examples: --- Example 1 (https://sourceforge.net) --- GET / HTTP/1.0 Host: sourceforge.net:443 User-Agent: retawq/0.2.6 [en] (text, tls; Linux) Accept: */* Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1 HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 00:37:18 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) PHP/4.3.9 mod_ssl/2.8.19 OpenSSL/0.9.7a X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9 Location: https://sourceforge.net/index.php Connection: close Content-Type: text/html GET /index.php HTTP/1.0 Host: sourceforge.net:443 User-Agent: retawq/0.2.6 [en] (text, tls; Linux) Accept: */* Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1 HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 00:37:20 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) PHP/4.3.9 mod_ssl/2.8.19 OpenSSL/0.9.7a X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9 Location: https://sourceforge.net/index.php Connection: close Content-Type: text/html --- Example 2 (http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/summaries.htm) --- GET /news/summaries.htm HTTP/1.0 Host: www.sciencedaily.com:80 User-Agent: retawq/0.2.6 [en] (text, tls; Linux) Accept: */* Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1 HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 00:39:58 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.3.10 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7a Location: http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/summaries.htm Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <TITLE>302 Found</TITLE> </HEAD><BODY> <H1>Found</H1> The document has moved <A HREF="http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/summaries.htm";>here</A>.<P> <HR> <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.sciencedaily.com Port 80</ADDRESS> </BODY></HTML> ----------------- On the one hand, this might be retawq-specific because I didn't see it with any other browser. On the other hand, I saw it only on Apache httpd servers and think that the HTTP specification explicitly forbids a redirection to the original URI; quote from RFC2616, 14.30: "The Location response-header field is used to redirect the recipient to a location *other* than the Request-URI..."; so maybe the httpd should make sure that the new URI is different from the original one and generate an error otherwise. A quick search for "redirect" in the CHANGES file of the current httpd 2.0.53 doesn't indicate that this problem might have been fixed for more recent versions than those in the examples. The most related changes I could find were in 2.0.32 and 2.0.28, but the descriptions are about different problems. So there are two questions: Can/will you solve the problem inside httpd somehow? And how could I change the request header to avoid the problem with existing httpd versions? I tried already several changes, but none of them made it work. Thanks in advance, Arne -- www.arne-thomassen.de
