Received: by taz.hyperreal.com (8.8.3/V2.0) id VAA28117; Sun, 15 Dec 1996 21:13:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from eat.organic.com by taz.hyperreal.com (8.8.3/V2.0) with ESMTP id VAA28113; Sun, 15 Dec 1996 21:13:22 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (brian@localhost) by eat.organic.com (8.8.3/8.6.12) with SMTP id VAA04502 for ; Sun, 15 Dec 1996 21:14:11 -0800 (PST) Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1996 21:14:11 -0800 (PST) From: Brian Behlendorf Reply-To: Brian Behlendorf To: new-httpd@hyperreal.com Subject: AOL BLOCKING ACCESS TO APACHE 1.2 SERVERS Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: new-httpd-owner@apache.org Precedence: bulk Reply-To: new-httpd@hyperreal.com I was just alerted to a serious problem - AOL's web proxies appear to be blocking access to web servers running Apache 1.2. Apache 1.2 is an HTTP/1.1 compliant web server - this means when a request is made to an Apache 1.2 server, the very first line of the HTTP response back from the server is HTTP/1.1 200 OK whereas most other servers today respond with HTTP/1.0 200 OK Apparently, AOL's proxies interpret HTTP/1.1 to be a "new language" that it does not understand, and returns this to clients accessing it:

UNSUPPORTED WEB VERSION

The Web address you requested is not available in a version supported by AOL. This is an issue with the Web site, and not with AOL. The owner of this site is using an unsupported HTTP language. If you receive this message frequently, you may want to set your web graphics preferences to COMPRESSED at Keyword: PREFERENCES

This change must have happened on Saturday, as we had tested a couple of our sites on AOL on Friday and all worked perfectly well. AOL is completely incorrect in denying access to servers running HTTP/1.1, and is standing in the way of evolving web standards. By definition any minor-number revision to HTTP (i.e., HTTP/1.0 --> HTTP/1.1) is backwards compatible, in so far that HTTP browsers should have no trouble interpreting the output of an HTTP/1.1 server, so long as the client identifies itself correctly as an HTTP/1.0 client. Many, many pains were taken to ensure this semantic was preserved. So, *any* HTTP 1.0 client (Netscape, MSIE, even all of AOL's browsers) "support" this HTTP language. There is no reason for AOL to be blocking these sites. Despite what AOL is telling you above, this is a problem with their proxies. Does someone want to double-check this in the morning (I'm leaving on a 3-day biz trip and will be largely out of touch) and if it's still the case, forward this along to the appropriate press and IETF working groups? This can be tested on www.organic.com, www.starwars.com, www.imdb.org, www.zyzzyva.com, and many others, all running Apache 1.2b1 or higher. Brian --=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-- brian@organic.com www.apache.org hyperreal.com http://www.organic.com/JOBS