Handling ambiguous requests
Anselm Baird-Smith (abaird@w3.org)
Fri, 6 Sep 1996 09:14:17 +0500
I will probably do the following: when you configure the server, you
can map any host names to given roots. In addition I will have a
(mandatory) default host (eg *default-root*) to handle ambiguous
requests, or IP based requests. More pragmatically, I will do a string
based comparison on the registered host names, against the given
Host header, if none of them match, then I will fallback to the
default root.
As Jigsaw is so flexible ;-) this default root can be anything,
including a redirection to some more specific resource, emitting an
error message, etc.
Anselm.
Patrick Montelo writes:
> Implementation Question: Handling ambiguous requests
>
> For a HTTP/1.1 origin server that does differentiate resources based on the
> host requested, certain requests can be ambiguous. Consider the following:
>
> Example 1:
>
> A single server, IP address 204.4.214.77, has been configured to serve for
> two different host names on the same port:
>
> pmontelo.spyglass.com:80
> pmontelo.foobar.com:80
>
> The following requests are ambiguous:
>
> GET http://204.4.214.77/ HTTP/1.1 <<< IP maps to more than one domain
> name/alias
> GET http://pmontelo/ HTTP/1.1 <<< Request from inside the
> spyglass.com domain
>
>
> Example 2:
>
> A single server, IP address 204.4.214.77, has been configured to serve for
> two different host names on the same port:
>
> pmontelo.spyglass.com:80
> foobar.spyglass.com:80
>
> Consider these request:
>
> GET http://204.4.214.77/ HTTP/1.1 <<< IP maps to more than one domain
> name/alias, ambiguous
> GET http://pmontelo/ HTTP/1.1 <<< Request from inside the
> spyglass.com domain, OK?
>
> My initial reaction is to respond with a 400 for all of these requests
> except the last example, which would map to pmontelo.spyglass.com:80.
>
> This forces the webmaster to explicitly solve any ambiguity in the server
> configuration.
>
> Anyone have any better ideas or see any problems with this approach?
>
>