httplib continuation packets

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Mon Nov 13 04:25:02 EST 2006


Haakon Riiser wrote:
> [Fredrik Lundh]
> 
>> Haakon Riiser wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, and it doesn't help.
>> then the server is mostly likely broken beyond repair.
> 
> It's not in my power to upgrade the server, unfortunately.
> Guess I'll have to use Perl.
> 
>> to see if this really is the problem, you could try moving the call to 
>> self._send_output() from the end of the endheaders() method to the end 
>> of the _send_request() method (around line 870 in httplib.py, at least 
>> in 2.5).
> 
> Tried this, but the tcpdump still looks the same (two packets: one
> with the headers, one with the body), and now it fails with
> 
> urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 501: Not Implemented
> 
> Nevertheless, I'm fairly sure that the packet fragmentation is
> the culprit.  It works perfectly with Perl, even when I make
> no effort at all to spoof the browser (no user-agent, referer,
> cookies, etc.).
> 
It really does seem quite bizarre that a server should respond 
differently to the same TCP request when it is split differently into IP 
datagrams.

There really is nothing wrong (from a standards point of view) with 
sending FIN with your last data segment. FIN means "I guarantee to send 
no more data, and will continue to acknowledge your segments until I see 
your FIN".

Are you planning to report this bug to Ipswitch? It certainly sounds 
like someone should.

regards
  Steve
-- 
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