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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."
GoDaddy blames Apple for both Safari and Opera simultaneously ceasing to work? That's a nice trick
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.
Yeah, that's go-daddy's fault all right. The Location field is supposed to contain the FULL URL, not just a relative one.
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.
I agree with that. I used to have a domain that I registered for two years with GoDaddy back in 2002.
At 2004, when the domain suppose to expire, I did not want to renew this domain, because it was for my ex-girlfriend. Besides the credit card that I used to register for this domain expired in 2003.
In August 2004, I noticed a charge to my credit card from GoDaddy. I argued that they did not have right to charge my credit card because:
1. The expiration date in their record is expired.
2. They never got any consent from me to auto renew the domain.
When I spoke with their customer service, the customer service managed to trick me to tell my new expiration date, and she subsequently changed the expiration information at their records, as I could see from their webpage.
I know I was stupid to be tricked like that, but I suppose this is not a company suppose to work.
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.
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.
Bad URL. You're right though. So the web server is doing something that appears to be rather dumb. I suppose Opera and Safari are trying to be clever - maybe try to avoiding an infinite loop. I can't be arsed to go and look at the HTTP RFC to see what it says on this kind of thing. I suspect it says no caching, but the browsers are trying to protect themselves from a potentially bad situation (continual redirects).
x t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5/ 236246&tid=177&tid=95
/?ABCDEFGH
/?ABCDEFGH HTTP/1.1x t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5/ 236246&tid=177&tid=95
x t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5/ 236246&tid=177&tid=95
Here's my Ethereal trace:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.photosparks.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
Accept-Language: en-gb,en-ca;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/08
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0
Location:
GET
Host: www.photosparks.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
Accept-Language: en-gb,en-ca;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/08
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0
Location: /
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.photosparks.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
Accept-Language: en-gb,en-ca;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/08
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:42:58 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_pointer/0.8 PHP/4.4.1
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.1
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
[...]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Basically, GoDaddy's web server is fundamentally broken and not spec compliant. No browser should legitimately be showing data. Whoever wrote this web server should be repeatedly slapped with a wet noodle.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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()?
A man said to the universe "Sir, I exist!"
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!"