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GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-so-much-with-the-go dept.

zackmac writes "For over two weeks domain registrar GoDaddy has been serving blank pages to Safari and Opera users who attempt to access sites using its domain forwarding and masking service. GoDaddy is blaming Apple as the source of the problem, and with nowhere to turn, Mac users are flocking to Apple's support forums to discuss the issue in-depth. Apple has so far been unresponsive and GoDaddy has directed affected customers to contact Apple Support. An inconvienent workaround is to open the website first in Firefox or Internet Explorer and then the page will load in Safari or Opera. Speculation abounds as to the cause of the problem and how to fix it. The current belief is malformed headers, an invalid 302 header with a bogus location and a redirect loop."

8 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Can anyone confirm this? by RandyOo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just put my wife's photography site online yesterday, and it's hosted via domain masking/redirection from godaddy. Anyone with Oprah or Safari have trouble getting to it?

    http://www.photosparks.com/

    1. Re:Can anyone confirm this? by larry+bagina · · Score: 3, Interesting
      ok...

      $ nc www.photosparks.com 80
      GET / HTTP/1.1
      HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
      Content-Length: 0
      Location: /?ABCDEFGH

      $ nc www.photosparks.com 80
      GET /?ABCDEFGH HTTP/1.1
      HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
      Content-Length: 0
      Location: /

      Note - the response came back instantly -- before I could enter the Host: header.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    2. Re:Can anyone confirm this? by ciscoguy01 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is NOT UNUSUAL. Typical of someone who tests his web work with IE. IE fixes ridiculous stuff on the fly, like the site I looked at some time ago in Firefox with several hundred TD tags and only two /TD tags. It didn't work with Firefox but IE rendered it OK.

      For the sake of interoperability it's usually good to design things so they "always work". But if you are testing it makes sense to test with a less robust platform than IE. You WANT to find the problems, not mask them.

      This does not change the fact that yeah, GoDaddy's server IS likely broken. But if they hadn't tested with IE they would have known.

      --
      .
  2. Weird. by DeadSea · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I fired up firefox with LiveHTTPHeaders extension and here is what I found when I contacted www.catalogueofships.com:

    > GET / HTTP/1.1

    < HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
    < Location: /?ABCDEFGH

    > GET /?ABCDEFGH HTTP/1.1

    < HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
    < Location: /

    > GET / HTTP/1.1

    < HTTP/1.x 200 OK

    It appears that the page is redirecting and then redirecting back. I can imagine that would confuse some browsers. Especially if the browser cached the first redirect and didn't actually fetch the same exact page a second time.

    There is probably something in the http spec about not caching temporary redirects. In fact not caching them makes perfect sense to me. So safari has a bug of some sort with redirect caching.

    However, what the server is doing seems to be fairly brain dead as well. Why would you redirect away and then redirect back? It appears that there is not cookie set between the two. The server must be remembering your IP address and serving you actual content on the second hit from that IP Address. That would certainly explain the "teaching issue" that causes safari to work with these sites after visiting with firefox.

    The only explanation that I can come up with is that somebody discovered this obscure caching bug in safari and built a system to expose it. It seems that the blank page problem would be easy to fix in either safari or the web server.

    1. Re:Weird. by Strepsil · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's not necessarily caching at fault - I used curl to take a look at this from a shell under OS X. It's weird. First, I got the redirect you saw. I requested the "?ABCDEFGH" page. This didn't give me a 302 redirect.

      ---
      $ curl -D - http://www.photosparks.com/?ABCDEFGH

      HTTP/1.0 200 OK
      Connection: Close
      Pragma: no-cache
      cache-control: no-cache
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

      <HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0.1; URL=/?ABCDEFGH">
      <META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no cache">
      <META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
      </HEAD></HTML>
      ---

      Ever since then, I get the intended result for every redirect page under GoDaddy, in _Safari_ as well as from curl.

      The first time I tested this, I got the white page. All I've done since is make a couple of requests from the command line, and now it all works.

      It's not related to caching or cookies, that's for sure. It must be IP tracking somewhere along the line.

      --
      Wasting your time since 1997.
  3. This is NOT a bug by od05 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is not a bug but a feature in Safari. Internet Explorer and Firefox will display http://www.stealyourpassword.com/paypal as http://www.paypal.com/ while Safari will show it's true address. It's to avoid forwarding addresses that are spoofed.

    1. Re:This is NOT a bug by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Can't replicate the stealyourpassword.com issue with Firefox 1.5. when I click on your link, all I get is a server not found error, and the URL bar clearly displays the full URL. Care to explain the bug a little further?

      --
      Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
    2. Re:This is NOT a bug by nystul555 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think the parent poster was using stealyourpassword.com as a fake example. stealyourpassword.com is not a registered domain name.