HTTP/1.1 non-compliance on POST request handling?

From: David Luyer <david@dont-contact.us>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:08:40 +1100

Guys,

HTTP/1.1 section 4.4 states:

   For compatibility with HTTP/1.0 applications, HTTP/1.1 requests
   containing a message-body MUST include a valid Content-Length header
   field unless the server is known to be HTTP/1.1 compliant. If a
   request contains a message-body and a Content-Length is not given,
   the server SHOULD respond with 400 (bad request) if it cannot
   determine the length of the message, or with 411 (length required) if
   it wishes to insist on receiving a valid Content-Length.

A customer of ours is complaining that they have an embedded device,
which is attempting to connect to a server it knows to be HTTP/1.1
compliant (as the device and server are from the same vendor), and
our transparent proxy is intercepting the connection and rejecting it
due to the lack of a content length header.

From what I can see, they are correct in their reading of the RFC;
the proxy server is enforcing the HTTP/1.0 behavior and it is a
problem as their client software has not been coded to work with
HTTP/1.0.

Comments? The code in question is around line 3070 of client_side.c
(and the if statement directly above that one is also relevant).

David.
Received on Tue Jan 13 2004 - 19:19:18 MST

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