Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 23:27:35 -0800 (PST)
From: Dean Gaudet <dgaudet@arctic.org>
To: Apache Group <new-httpd@hyperreal.com>
Subject: Re: [BUG]: "No support for byte ranges ("Range")" on Solaris 2.x
 (fwd)
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Navigator 3.0 seems to do partial requests for images... at least the
linux and irix versions do. 

I love these little get-rich-quick schemes.  There was another one I saw
that encoded all images as multipart/mixed documents so that when users
tried to Save them to disk they wouldn't work as expected (since most
graphics programs don't expect a mime document).  They claimed to be
protecting your images from unauthorized use.

Dean

On Sun, 9 Feb 1997, Alexei Kosut wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Feb 1997, mjb@oneworld.owt.com wrote:
> 
> > I have written a program which uses byte-range requests to
> > support resuming file downloads.
> > 
> > The response header I'm seeing indicates your server is not
> > recognizing the instruction for byte-ranges.  
> > (My program does work w/ Microsoft's web servers.)
> > 
> > If you want to use it to test, my program is at:
> > http://www.headlightsw.com/
> 
> You have not provided nearly enough information to diagnose this
> problem, if it is one. I suspect that you may be requesting byteranges
> for documents that do not support them; Apache sends an
> "Accept-Ranges: bytes" header with any entity that it will
> byteserve. Is it sending them for the documents you have tried?
> 
> Apache implements byteranges exactly as specified in the HTTP/1.1
> specification, RFC 2068, which you can find
> http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/ - this support has been
> thoroughly tested, and works fine with other byterange applications,
> such as Adobe's PDF plugin for web browers (though it should be noted
> that Netscape Navigator does have a bug that prevented Apache from
> serving PDF files in a way Navigator could read - Apache 1.2b7 and
> later will contain a workaround for this, and Navigator 4.0b2 will
> contain a fix as well.)
> 
> In addition, your docs seems rather self-serving and self-centered. The
> fact is, most FTP servers have had the capability to server partial
> files for years, wheras the capability was only recently introduced to
> HTTP, which explains your 'discovery' that more FTP servers support
> partial requests than HTTP.
> 
> Additionally, your idea is far from new. Most respectable FTP clients
> (and by this I don't mean web browsers with built-in FTP browsers)
> have supported resuming file transfers for as long as *I* can
> remember, and even early beta versions of Netscape Navigator 2.0
> resumed image downloads using a partial request where possible; this
> feature was removed because Navigator's implementation of it had
> problems, and it was never re-instated (I assume Netscape had other things
> they had that took priority).
> 
> In short, your product is not new, not novel, and not needed. If
> Apache really does have a bug, please give us specifics (not just
> "it's broken because it doesn't work with my program"), and we will
> fix it. However, I believe Apache works fine, and it is *your* program
> that is misbehaving.
> 
> Thanks for using Apache!
> 
> --
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Alexei Kosut <akosut@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us>      The Apache HTTP Server
> URL: http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/   http://www.apache.org/
> 
>