See Raw Headers with Netcat

October 5th, 2015
tech
Getting response headers is easy: run curl -D- -o/dev/null -sS [url] or load the site in a browser with the networking tab open. Getting request headers is harder, because webservers don't have a way to dump this exactly as they received it. Yes, you can set them to log specific headers, but logging all headers exactly as they came over the wire isn't something I see in nginx or apache. Netcat can help here. Start it up on some unused port:
    nc -lp 8070
Now make the thing you're debugging visit yoursite:8070. Netcat will print out what headers you got:
    GET / HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.jefftk.com:8070
    Referer: http://www.jefftk.com/...
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
    Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache
    Accept-Language: en-US
    Connection: Keep-alive
    Accept: */*
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
    ...
See the duplicate Accept-Encoding header? It turned out that A was adding an extra encoding header which then made B disable gzip. [1] Once I had the raw headers as sent it was pretty clear what the problem was.

(Because the problem was a duplicated header I'm glad I didn't go with a higher level tool that might have masked that problem by storing headers in hashtable or something.)


[1] Sniffing the traffic would have been ideal, but I wasn't in a position to get in between them.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Book Review: The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory

Against the Internet

via Thing of Things April 25, 2025

Impact, agency, and taste

understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking

via benkuhn.net April 19, 2025

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

When I thought about this question it was really hard to figure out because the way it's phrased it's essentially either a chicken just pops into existence, or an egg just pops into existence, without any parent animals involved. I thought about t…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts April 13, 2025

more     (via openring)