Re: Firewall problems with RDF MIME type?

Now that you mention it, I realize I have also experienced some "strange"
behavior. When the Wilbur [1] HTTP client requests a URL (with Accept:
header containing only application/rdf+xml), I sometimes don't get any
response and sometimes get the corresponding text/html response (from some
servers that are able to differentiate between the two) when I am behind our
corporate firewall, but the correct RDF file when I am on the "open"
internet. I haven't had time to debug this yet, though.

Kind regards,

    - Ora

[1] http://wilbur-rdf.sourceforge.net/

-- 
Ora Lassila  mailto:ora.lassila@nokia.com  http://www.lassila.org/
Research Fellow & Head of Competence Area (Data Modeling & Management)
Nokia Research Center / Boston

> From: Phil Archer <phil.archer@icra.org>
> Organization: ICRA
> Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:57:10 +0100
> To: SWIG <semantic-web@w3.org>
> Subject: Firewall problems with RDF MIME type?
> Resent-From: <semantic-web@w3.org>
> Resent-Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:02:12 +0000
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> A couple of months back I raised a problem that the RDF MIME type is not
> widely supported by servers in default configuration. Apache seems generally
> to send its default MIME type of plain/text and IIS seems to refuse to send
> anything at all (until you configure them properly). We have some work to do
> to get it into the mainstream!
> 
> Be that as it may, I've now hit a new problem. Firewalls don't seem to like
> the RDF MIME type either. At my encouraging, a company (www.madesafe.com)
> put an RDF file (labels.rdf) in its root directory and then configured
> Apache to include an HTTP Response Header to point to it (this involved
> installing an Apache module and adding the RDF MIME type).
> 
> No problem - except a lot of the website became inaccessible! Reconfigure
> Apache to take out the RDF MIME type - problem disappears. It's not the
> server, it's the firewall that thinks it's detecting a problem. Configuring
> the firewall _didn't_ solve it. (The solution for now, has been to rename
> the file as labels.xml - so it gets the text/xml MIME type but it's better
> than text/plain).
> 
> Has anyone come across anything similar? Is there a real risk with something
> that declares a MIME type of application/rdf+xml on it, in which case the
> firewall was correct to block it, or is it just that we have to educate the
> firewall manufactures as well as people who decide default configurations of
> servers?
> 
> (I've deliberately omitted the name of the firewall - suffice to say it's a
> good one form a good company).
> 
> Phil.
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 15 April 2005 14:09:21 UTC