Braindead server? or "What am I doing wrong?"

[A user of my browser] wrote:
> 
> I encountered the following and thought I should let you know about it.
> When I try to access the following server
> 
> http://www.mck.co.za/
> 
> it returns the following error message 'Unable to claim receive
> stream (http)'.

This server in particular just keeps issuing (illegally specified) 
redirects to itself:

GET /default.asp HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mck.co.za
Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP/1.0 302 Moved
Server: Microsoft-IIS/3.0
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 1997 14:34:08 GMT
Location: /default.asp

It goes on to attempt to set a cookie, but I've got the browser
configured at my end to throw away cookies.   Hence, it attempts to
follow the redirect.  Then it just carries on talking to the server,
getting a response, reissuing the request and looping around forever
unless it runs out of memory which is what happened to my user
reporting the bug to me or until it hits the trap in my code for
a maximum number of redirects on a request.  Once the latter occurs,
it stops and complains of a redirect loop.

I also notice that the Location header is illegal too.  Luckily, my
Location handles resolves it relative to the Request-URI before reissuing
the request.

What is Netscape & Internet Explorer doing that I don't??  I have had no
end of troubles getting my client to talk to Microsoft IIS servers... they
seem to issue all these circular redirects all the time - particularly
when the filenames end in .asp 


-- 
Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/

Received on Monday, 9 June 1997 12:07:05 UTC