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GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera
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."
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/
GoDaddy blames Apple for both Safari and Opera simultaneously ceasing to work? That's a nice trick
goDaddy has horrible support. They banned my domain and claimed thousands of people were getting emails pointing to my site to capture ebay passwords. I had been using this auction add-on for ecommerce. To cut a long story short, I moved to yahoo which offers free dns forwarding!
Update: GoDaddy said that not all Safari are having difficulty accessing forwarded domain names and disclaimed responsibility for the problems; the company, however, indicated that the problem would be fixed, but gave no specific time frame: "we have determined the issue is NOT related to a glitch in our service, but rather with a product supplied by one of our vendors. We are actively working on resolving this issue and expect it to be fixed shortly."
The best solution to this problem is to avoid Godaddy entirely. They are fast making Verisign and ICANN look reputable.
> GET / HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily /?ABCDEFGH
< Location:
> 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.
Notice that I specified HTTP/1.1, but it never even gave me a chance to specify a host header. The 302 came almost immediately after I hit Enter on the GET line. I can't see how that could possibly be a Safari or Opera problem.
GoDaddy can GoFuckThemSelves
#!/
We are talking about Apple users here.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14
rooooar
GoDaddy's server is returning:
This is a violation of RFC 2616. Section 14.30 specifies the Location header to contain an absolute URI:
Firefox is tolerant of the spec violation and Safari and Opera are apparently not. I spent many years writing HTTP proxies and after working around many broken clients and server, I have little sympathy for those who violate the spec and then whine that others should work around the problem. GoDaddy needs to fix their server. Accomodating their brokeness, just will encourage others to be sloppy as well.
When I click on the Gallery link I get a 1" x 1" box with a lower case "f" in it. :)
Most likely, If i click the "f" a macromedia flash animation will appear. I'm not willing to take that chance.
I'm using firefox on linux and I use the firefox flash blocker extension.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Also Godaddy's servers are not allowing client headers to be sent.
Godaddy's servers IMMEDIATLY respond with the redirect not allowing the client to specify it's user agent, the host it's trying to access (http 1.1 spec) or any other headers. as it responds with the 302 reponse after ONE CR/LF instead of 2 CR/LF which is required by the HTTP specification..
This is CLEARLY Go Daddy incorrectly following the HTTP specification with their server.
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.
Did this guy just call my browser Oprah?
Wow.. I work for GoDaddy and I have heard nothing regarding us blaming Apple for this problem. I've heard plenty about us blaming another vendor (whom I can't name), but not Apple. Unfortunately, it's not a problem that can be fixed until this unnamed vendor provides a patch.
I would agree with you except for the fact that the error is obviously on GoDaddy's end, and they are blaming Apple. If the article stated that there was a problem, and GoDaddy had no intention of fixing it because it only affect a small number of people, it would be unfortunate, but expected. As it is, they are trying to pass the buck and blame someone else. Also, point of fact, Safari and Opera have more than 0.25% marketshare. So, all things considered, your post is a troll. Rather than mod you down, I thought I should explain why you will be modded down by someone else shortly.
Rhapsody in Numbers
The problem with the 302 response is not the relative URL in the Location: header, it's the lack of blank line after the headers. The RFC requires this and Safari's network stack doesn't (yet) support tolerance of this quirk.
GoDaddy.com learned that some customers using the Apple Safari web browser were having difficulty accessing forwarded domain names. At this time, we have determined the issue is NOT related to a glitch in our service, but rather with a product supplied by one of our vendors. We are actively working on resolving this issue and expect it to be fixed shortly.
:|
It doesn't actually look as though GoDaddy is blaming Apple as much as simply not knowing what the actual culprit is. A small, but possibly important, difference.
That being said, I really hate their name.
#SickNotWeak
GoDaddy's superbowl commercial for this year should be BLANK! That'd be an accurate representation of the service.
Statistics
Safari is the #3 most popular web browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox, according to whoever these guys are. It's also the #1 browser on the #2 desktop OS. To ignore Safari is to embrace Microsoft's monopoly. Most of us here on Slashdot aren't particularly happy with that idea.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Less of the elitism please. While it's very simple to confirm that they are sending malformed headers, that's not to say that the headers are the origin of the problem. In case you haven't noticed, the web is full of broken code, just because you see something that doesn't adhere to the RFC, it doesn't mean that this is necessarily what is causing the problem.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
You've got bigger problems than that, my friend - someone who claims to love you keeps trying to dress you in gap clothes
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Case 1: /?ABCDEFGH
[canterbury:~] gjh% telnet forgreatergood.org 80
Trying 64.202.167.129...
Connected to forgreatergood.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0
Location:
Connection closed by foreign host.
Case 2:
....(message text)
[canterbury:~] gjh% telnet forgreatergood.org 80
Trying 64.202.167.129...
Connected to forgreatergood.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: forgreatergood.org
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 01:15:53 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_pointer/0.8 PHP/4.4.1
X-Redirected-By: mod_pointer - http://stderr.net/mod_pointer/
Location: http://www.wavepulse.net/forgreatergood
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
The only difference was that with Case 2, I pasted in the request lines atomically, whereas in Case 1, I typed it line by line.
This is probably down to a brain dead content-switching device looking packet by packet instead of reassembling the stream. It is broken.
Greg
This is old and inaccurate information based on text from his blog that was taken entirely out of context. Move along, nothing to see here.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Try going to the linked Apple Support discussion board page and looking at this message timestamped Dec 7, 2005 3:32 PM:
I just wrote and received the following response from Godaddy:
"Response from WILLIAM G
12/07/2005 04:23 PM
Dear Matthew Wanderer
Thank you for contacting Customer Support.
Apple recently released an update to Java, Version J2SE 5.0. There is a bug in this release that has caused forwarding to stop working properly for both the browsers Safari and Opera on Mac OS X. You will need to report this bug to Apple Computers using the Report Bugs feature from within the Safari menu. This situation was caused by changes in Java and not GoDaddy. Because of that a resolution is completely out of our hands. I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.
Please let us know if we can help you in any other way."
They claim it's the Java update, which is what I thought it might be in my initial post. Frustrating is just the beginning here because I quite sure Apple will pass the buck as well, and why wouldn't they.
And the JRE version is just a red-herring.
30s of investigation on my park shows that their HTTP header parsing is fux0red. The biggest problem IMNSHO is that they are *not* looking for the end of the HTTP header, they are looking for the end of the FIRST PACKET.
This will break any HTTP client which uses multiple write()s to the socket while constructing its query, and either takes too long for Nagle, has the Nagle Algorithm turned off, or constructs a query which exceeds the MTU of any network between itself and GoDaddy.
GoDaddy is badly broken. The programmer who wrote the redirect code DID NOT read Stevens UNP or TCP/IP Illustrated Volume I.
The JRE "fix" is probably just a default state change of Nagle or the HTTP header contruction code in some fancy-pants object. (I'm a UNIX C hacker, not a Java guy).
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Define an agile browser, please.
An agile browser is one that can perform complex gymnastic manoevres while simultanously rendering web pages.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I actually heard a year ago that many people dropped Godaddy, because they were serving different/incorrect/empty pages ...
.... good chance that they do not see crap, and your godaddy site goes down the loo...
to crawlers and people's sites were dropping from SE indexes like crazy
dunno, never used them, but since those conplaints by many I did not want to go with them...
Now it makes me wonder what googlebot, msnbot, yahoo and other members of the artificial gang see from these 302/404/no source sites
The current belief is malformed headers, an invalid 302 header with a bogus location and a redirect loop.
That's not it. That's not it by a mile. The real cause of this problem is that GoDaddy never bothered testing their site with anything other than two browsers. Hell, they probably only tested it with IE and the FF users just got lucky.
What the fsck is it with web developers that they never ever test their pages? And what is it with their managers that they don't insist on testing?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Clearly, these guys are MoCo hacks and Firefox fanboys. This is the insidious arm of the "Spread Firefox" campaign :)
This is bullshit. Try using the command line lynx or curl browsers... it fails with them and they are not dependent on Java. This is a configuration error on GoDaddy's servers that started around November 28. Before then Lynx, Curl, Safari, and Opera all worked find when interacting with their forwarding service.
A man said to the universe "Sir, I exist!"
lynx www.justoneclubcard.com
:( and it has nothing to do with apple, jre, java or safari or SCO ... it is lynx on linux ..
Looking up www.justoneclubcard.com first
Looking up www.justoneclubcard.com
Making HTTP connection to www.justoneclubcard.com
Sending HTTP request.
HTTP request sent; waiting for response.
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Data transfer complete
lynx: Start file could not be found or is not text/html or text/plain
Exiting...
sorry dude
oh wait didn't linux contain SCO code ?
hehe. Customers screaming, reputation going through the floor and they're sitting about waiting for someone else to fix the problem...
Deleted
Right. It doesn't loop in firefox, which was used for that trace. Opera and Safari behave differently, evidently caching the 302 response for "/".
I'm not sure why GoDaddy is doing the double-moved-temporarily thing. How are other ISPs performing the redirects?
bp