support.microsoft.com?

[Colin Alston]

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.

[Marshall Eubanks]

It looks to me like they are doing file compression on the site.

(E.g., there seems to be an index.html.gz file there.)

This practice is described in "High Performance Web Sites" and other
fine publications. I
would be curious to know if this is a problem with Lynx or with their
site setup.

Regards
Marshall

Post by Colin Alston
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.
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http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog

[Jutta Zalud]

Post by Marshall Eubanks
It looks to me like they are doing file compression on the site.
(E.g., there seems to be an index.html.gz file there.)
This practice is described in "High Performance Web Sites" and other
fine publications. I
would be curious to know if this is a problem with Lynx or with their
site setup.

Looks more like a problem with Microsoft's site setup.

Lynx has no problems with html.gz my own testsite
http://www1.netzwerklabor.at/forum/ (you may use it for testing, but it
is *not* on a high performance server ;)

Regards,
Jutta

[Marc Manthey]

Post by Colin Alston
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.

hi colin ,

i checked the page , you seems right ;)

This page is not Valid (no Doctype found)!

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsupport.microsoft.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

40 errors ;)


Marc

Post by Colin Alston
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[Ben O'Hara]

Post by Colin Alston
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.
_______________________________________________
NANOG mailing list
http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog

We had a problem this morning accessing it via a squid proxy, worked fine
direct but not via squid.

Fixed it with a

# Fix support.microsoft.com by removing Accept-Encoding header
acl support.microsoft.com dstdomain support.microsoft.com
header_access Accept-Encoding deny support.microsoft.com


Ben

[Colin Alston]

Post by Ben O'Hara
Fixed it with a
# Fix support.microsoft.com <http://support.microsoft.com> by removing
Accept-Encoding header
acl support.microsoft.com <http://support.microsoft.com> dstdomain
support.microsoft.com <http://support.microsoft.com>
header_access Accept-Encoding deny support.microsoft.com

Seems squid3 needs some slightly different hackdashery

acl support.microsoft.com dstdomain support.microsoft.com
reply_header_access Accept-Encoding deny support.microsoft.com
request_header_access Accept-Encoding deny support.microsoft.com

[Jack Bates]

Post by Colin Alston
If I use Firefox or IE behind some Squid proxies in certain places, it
doesn't understand the content either.

IE in particular using HTTP 1.1 by default, but has HTTP 1.1 via proxy turned
off. It's a check box in the advanced tab. Also required when your proxy does
it's own compression to make dialup slightly more useable.

Jack

[Bjørn Mork]

Post by Colin Alston
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:


***@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
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:43:58 GMT
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.
***@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
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:46:13 GMT
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

[Chris Stone]

Post by Bjørn Mork
Not only that. They are actually redirecting to a 404 not found page
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...

All the more reason to tell M$ to kiss off and move to other solutions. It's
only the beginning.....



Chris