Colin Alston <karnaugh@karnaugh.za.net> writes:
Has anyone else noticed strange things with support.microsoft.com?
If I wget it (‘http://support.microsoft.com/’) from anywhere, I get an
index.html fine.
If I use lynx, I get gibberish (gzipped content, without a correct header)
If I use Firefox or IE behind some Squid proxies in certain places, it
doesn't understand the content either.
Looks like either they are not correctly encoding the content based on
browser capabilities.
Not only that. They are actually redirecting to a 404 not found page
based on User-Agent. Compare these two requests:
bjorn@canardo:~$ telnet support.microsoft.com 80
Trying 207.46.248.248...
Connected to support.microsoft.akadns.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: support.microsoft.com
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Connection: close
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
P3P: CP="ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI"
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
ETag:
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Location: /default.aspx?scid=gp;[ln];gsserr404&style=error&errurl=%2fDefault.aspx
Set-Cookie: .ASPXANONYMOUS=JUEKFqPcyAEkAAAAZWU4OTVjZDktZTQyNi00ODNkLTkxMmMtMmZiNjhjZDg4NDYyIaA8To0Ty4xrBwpDO9AYeo974f81; expires=Thu, 03-Jul-2008 00:23:58 GMT; path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 196
Connection closed by foreign host.
bjorn@canardo:~$ telnet support.microsoft.com 80
Trying 207.46.248.248...
Connected to support.microsoft.akadns.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: support.microsoft.com
Connection: close
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
P3P: CP="ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo OUR SAMo CNT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI"
ETag:
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Cache-Control: public
Expires: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:45:06 GMT
Vary: *
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 28183
Connection closed by foreign host.
The site is designed specifically NOT to work except if you've got an
approved browser. I guess they just don't want lynx users there...
Bjørn