Firewall problems with RDF MIME type?

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 12:01:58 UTC