It's the first time I am doing something with headers. I am mainly concerned with Cache-Control but there may be others I will need to check as well. For example, I try to send the following header to the browser (based on tutorials I just read):
Cache-Control:private, max-age=2011-12-30 11:40:56
Google Chrome displays it this way in Network -> Headers -> Response headers, but how do I know if it's correct, that there aren't any typos, syntax errors and such? Will it really work? Will the browser behave like I want it to, or will it treat it like a gibberish (something like "unknown header/value")? I've tried sending nonsensical headers on purpose but they got displayed with the rest. Is there any Chrome tool / addon for that, or any other way? Thank you in advance!
I'm afraid you won't be able to check if the resource has been cached by proxies en route, but you can check if your browser has cached it.
While in the Network panel of Chrome DevTools, hit F5 to reload your page. You should see something like "304 Not Modified" in the status field for the resource you are treating (which means the resource has not been modified and its contents were not received from the server but rather loaded from the browser's cache.)
Related
I am writing a search engine plugin for Firefox.
I want to implement search suggestions, so I want my plugin to send requests to my server to get them.
In order to debug this functionality I need to see what requests have been sent and what response is returned.
I noticed that Firebug does not log this info. So I need something else. How can I do that?
The add-on LiveHTTPHeaders works.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-http-headers/
Also try Ctrl+Shift+Q and look at the Network tab, that will probably work, too, although I haven't used that before.
Tools-->Web Developer--->Browser Console(Ctrl+Shift+J)
And in the tab of Net, check "Log Request and Response Bodies"
Sometimes I come across an image that I can't scrape so that it can be saved. An example of this is:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/plumdistrict.com-production/perks/12321/image/original.?1325898487
When I hit the url from Internet Explorer I see the image but when I try to get it from the code below I get the following error message "System.Net.WebException The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden" error with GetResponse:
string url = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/plumdistrict.com-production/perks/12321/image/original.?1325898487";
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
Any ideas on how to get this image?
Edit:
I am able to get to save images that do have extensions. For example I can scrape the following image just fine:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/plumdistrict.com-production/perks/12659/image/original.jpg?1326828951
Although HTTP is originally supposed to be stateless, there are a lot of implementations that rely on it being stateless. I could configure my webserver to only accept requests for "http://mydomain.com/sexy_avatar.jpg" if you provide a cookie proving you were logged in. If not, I send you a redirect 303 to "http://mydomain.com/avatar_for_public_use.jpg".
Amazon could be doing the same. Try to load the web page using Chrome, and look at the Network view in developer mode (CTRL+SHIFT+J) to see all headers supplied to the website. Maybe you even need to do a full navigation in the same session before you are allowed to see the image. This is certainly the case in many web applications I have developed :-)
Well, it looks like it's being generated from a script (possibly being retrieved from a database). The server should be sending a file/content type to go along with that... but it doesn't seem to be, which I believe is a violation of standards.
My Linux box knows full well that that's a JPEG image once it's on my hard drive, because it examines file headers rather than relying on extensions. Perhaps there is a tool to do the same in Windows?
Edit: Actually, on further contemplation, it seems odd that you'd get a 403 for that. Perhaps the server is actually blocking you from retrieving the file in that manner.
There are several topics about the problem with cross-domain AJAX. I've been looking at these and the conclusion seems to be this:
Apart from using somthing like JSONP, or a proxy sollution, you should not be able to do a basic jquery $.post() to another domain
My test code looks something like this (running on "http://myTestdomain.tld/path/file.html")
var myData = {datum1 : "datum", datum2: "datum"}
$.post("http://External-Ip:port", myData,function(return){alert(return);});
When I tried this (the reason I started looking), chrome-console told me:
XMLHttpRequest cannot load
http://External-IP:port/page.php. Origin
http://myTestdomain.tld is not allowed
by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.
Now this is, as far as I can tell, expected. I should not be able to do this. The problem is that the POST actually DOES come trough. I've got a simple script running that saves the $_POST to a file, and it is clear the post gets trough. Any real data I return is not delivered to my calling script, which again seems expected because of the Access-control issue. But the fact that the post actually arrived at the server got me confused.
Is it correct that I assume that above code running on "myTestdomain" should not be able to do a simple $.post() to the other domain (External-IP)?
Is it expected that the request would actually arrive at the external-ip's script, even though output is not received? or is this a bug. (I'm using Chrome 11.0.696.60 )
I posted a ticket about this on the WebKit bugtracker earlier, since I thought it was weird behaviour and possibly a security risk.
Since security-related tickets aren't publicly viewable, I'll quote the reply from Justin Schuh here:
This is implemented exactly as required by the spec. For simple cross-origin requests http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/#simple-method> there is no pre-flight check; the request is made and the response cannot be read if the appropriate headers do not authorize the requesting origin. Functionally, this is no different than creating a form and using script to make an off-origin POST (which has always been possible).
So: you're allowed to do the POST since you could have done that anyway by embedding a form and triggering the submit button with javascript, but you can't see the result. Because you wouldn't be able to do that in the form scenario.
A solution would be to add a header to the script running on the target server, e.g.
<?php
header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://your_source_domain");
....
?>
Haven't tested that, but according to the spec, that should work.
Firefox 3.6 seems to handle it differently, by first doing an OPTIONS to see whether or not it can do the actual POST. Firefox 4 does the same thing Chrome does, or at least it did in my quick experiment. More about that is on https://developer.mozilla.org/en/http_access_control
The important thing to note about the JavaScript same-origin policy restriction is that it is something built into modern browsers for security - it is not a limitation of the technology or something enforced by servers.
To answer your question, neither of these are bugs.
Requests are not stopped from reaching the server - this gives the server the option to allow these cross-domain requests by setting the appropriate headers1.
The response is also received back by the browser. Before the use of the access control headers 1, responses to cross-domain requests would be stopped dead in their tracks by a security conscious browser - the browser would receive the response but it would not hand it off to the script. With the access control headers, the server has the option of setting the appropriate headers indicating to a compliant browser that it would like to allow certain origin URLs to make cross domain requests.
The exact behaviour on response might differ between browsers - I can't recall for sure now but I think Chrome calls the success callback function when using jQuery's ajax() but the response is empty. IIRC, Firefox will not invoke the success function.
I get the same thing happening for me. You are able to post across domains but are not able to receive a response. This is what I expected to be able to do and happens for me in Firefox, Chrome, and IE.
One way to kind of get around this caveat is having a local php file with will call the data via curl and respond the response to your javascript. (Kind of restated what you said you knew already.)
Yes, it's correct and you won't be able to do that unless you use any proxy.
No, request won't go to the external IP as soon as there is such limitation.
I have 3 AJAX functions to move data between a Django app on my website and some JavaScript using YUI in the browser. There is not a major difference between them in terms of their structure, concept, code, etc. 2 of them work fine, but in the 3rd one, I get one spurious HTTP request immediately after the intended request. Its POST data contains a subset of the POST data of the intended request. The request meta data is identical except for the CONTENT_LENGTH (obviously) and the CONTENT_TYPE which is 'text/plain; charset=UTF-8' for the intended and 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' for the unwanted request. I do not set the content type explicitely at all which seems to suggest both requests do not have the same origin and the second one just pops out of thin air.
The intended request sets HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL': 'no-cache' and 'HTTP_PRAGMA': 'no-cache', the spurious one does not. The dev server log output for both requests is
[15/Feb/2010 15:00:12] "POST /settings/ HTTP/1.1" 200 0
What does the last 0 at the end mean ? Could not find any documentation on that. This value is usually non-zero... In Apache, it is the total size in bytes of the server response, can someone confirm it's the same for Django ?
My problem obviously is to find out where this additional request comes from.
I am fairly familiar with JS debugging using Firebug and I think I'm good at Python and Django, but I do not know a lot about the internals of HTTP requests and responses. I can breakpoint and step through the JS code that sends the intended XMLHTTP request, but that breakpoint does not get hit again.
The problem occurs with both FF3 and Safari, I'm on Snow Leopard, so I can't test with IE or Chrome.
I've looked at Django debugging techniques and tools like http://robhudson.github.com/django-debug-toolbar/ but I think I already have the information they can give me.
Can someone advise on a strategy or a tool to narrow the problem down ?
The problematic AJAX function submits form data, the working two don't. Forms have a default action which takes place when the form is submitted: post a request with the form data. I failed to prevent this default action.
So the spurious request did indeed come out of the dark underwood of the browser, there is no code in my js files that sends it.
Solution:
YAHOO.util.Event.preventDefault(event);
at the beginning of the form submit event handler.
See also http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/event/eventsimple.html
How can I debug what is being returned by IIS(6) when the response goes through proxies before getting to the browser?
I have requests for static files which are being sent with the 'Accept-encoding: gzip' header. These are being gzipped correctly. However, if a 'Via: ' header (to redirect the response via a proxy) is also included the content is not received gzipped by the browser.
I want to know if the issue is with IIS not applying the compression or related to something the proxy is doing.
How can I investigate this problem?
This is related to IIS6 not doing gzip compression when including Via header in request.
In case anyone else hits this problem i believe it's due to the "HcNoCompressionForProxies" option, configurable in the metabase. It specifically lets you disable compression for proxied requests.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/05f67ae3-fab6-4822-8465-313d4a3a473e.mspx?mfr=true
If your still interested my answer would be install Fiddler probably on the client first. For HTML snooping you can't do much better.
That would be my first port of call.