- From: Erica Douglass <erica@simpli.biz>
- Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 10:13:19 -0800
- To: <www-html@w3.org>
Hi all, I was surfing the web a bit in Mosaic today for nostalgic purposes, and I noticed something curious. While sites like Google and Yahoo loaded decently, any sites I went to that were hosted on our servers made the browser fall into an infinite loop. To see why, I tailed our browser logs and grabbed the command that Mosaic was using -- a simple GET / HTTP/1.0. I telnetted in to a couple of the domains we host on port 80 and issued the same command. I got back an odd response -- a 403 Found with a link to the same website I had just requested. For instance, telnetting to www.onthehouse.com port 80 sends the Found URL back as http://www.onthehouse.com. No wonder this poor old browser was falling into an infinite loop! I vaguely remember that this has something to do with name-based virtual hosting. I have two questions. 1. What do modern browsers do to get around this? I understand that they send some sort of HOST header, but what should I do e.g. if I am telnetting into the server? 2. Would turning off name-based virtual hosting for sites that are using their own IP address result in a performance gain? The browser would not have to send two requests... but perhaps modern browsers always send the HOST header and thus name-based virtual hosting is no slower than regular IP-based hosting. These questions are more curiosity than anything, as I continue to learn how HTTP works and what modern browsers do that older ones didn't. Thanks in advance for an explanation! Erica Douglass Lead Web Developer Simpli, Inc. http://www.simpli.biz
Received on Friday, 14 March 2003 13:14:56 UTC