Re: OK server returning 500 Server Error - why?

Rodney Wines (Rodney.Wines@ahqps.alcatel.fr)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 15:15:23 +0200 

Also, if you reference a specific URL, then the HEAD request to Netscape 3.x
servers will work properly.  For example (assuming there's an "index.htm"
file in the directory on the server):

    HEAD http://www.zdnet.com/yil/index.htm

I've just upgraded a couple of our web servers from Netscape Enterprise 2.x
to 3.6, and discovered the problem.  The behavior of 3.x is not consistent
with 2.x.  When configuring the server, you can specify default index
filenames.  For example, "index.htm, index.html, home.html".  Then, if a user
specifies URL with a directory and no filename, the server looks for a file
in the directory with one of the default names.  If it finds one, it displays
it.  In addition, you can specify a particular name to use for a home page,
"index.htm", for instance, or (via a radio button from the configuration
page), you can tell the server to look for one of the index files to use as
the home page.

I had always used the latter option.  However, after the upgrade, I
discovered that a HEAD without a specific filename returned a "500 Server
Error", although as noted, a GET worked fine.  Since the script that was
sending the HEAD request was monitoring my web server, and restarting it if
the script thought the server was dead, this caused me a LOT of grief!

At least Netscape 3.6 servers don't seem to hang, for no apparent reason, as
2.x servers did, and return "user agent timeout" (which was the reason I
wrote my script in the first place).  I guess that's progress.

Rodney

----- Original Message -----
From: Gisle Aas <gisle@aas.no>
To: <jdimpson@acm.org>
Cc: LWP Mailing List <libwww-perl@ics.uci.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 12, 1999 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: OK server returning 500 Server Error - why?


> "Jeremy D. Impson" <jdimpson@source.syr.edu> writes:
>
> > > Seems the server simply doesn't like "HEAD" requests. Your browser
> > > uses the "GET" method, and if your try
> > >
> > >  % GET http://www.zdnet.com/yil/
> > >
> > > everything works fine, too. Who knows why they (mis)configured their
server
> > > to disable "HEAD"...
> >
> >
> > I've seen this with couple Netscape 3.5 Enterprise servers.  So my code
> > checks for 5XX errors when doin HEAD and reconnects with a GET.
>
> If you do a GET request, with $ua->max_size(1) then the client will
> disconnect as soon as it has seen all headers.  That's almost as good
> as HEAD.
>
> Regards,
> Gisle
>
>