[NANOG] support.microsoft.com?

Thu Apr 24 13:49:05 UTC 2008

Colin Alston <karnaugh at karnaugh.za.net> writes:

> 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:

bjorn at 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.
bjorn at 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