130755 - DNS resolve bug when intranet hostname given

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[fillup]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020311
BuildID:    2002031104

Hi,
I have a server running on my home network.  It is steavis.  Or more fully, it's
steavis.home.hacksciences.com .  That is not a name visible to any external DNS.

When I type:
http://steavis/
or http://steavis:8080/
it works fine.  and let's say i leave off the trailing slash:
http://steavis
that works fine too.  mozilla changes my entry in the address bar to
http://steavis/ and we're off on our merry way.

The problem came when i typed in (to see my default apache install's manual):
http://steavis/manual
When i typed that in, the first time it said "Error: host
steavis.home.hacksciences.com not found" (as you can probably deduce, my windows
workstation here is set to append "home.hacksciences.com" to  unqualified DNS
lookups, and that steavis is also in fact the DNS server).
But when i typed:  http://steavis/manual/ **with the trailing slash** it worked
fine.  not only that, but now the bug has changed, and i can't reproduce it. 
now, it's almost weirder:

i typed in http://steavis/manual **without the trailing slash** and then mozilla
changed my address bar reading to 
http://steavis.home.hacksciences.com/manual/ **note trailing slash and the
re-resolving of my domain name** and then it worked fine and displayed my manual.



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. The steps to reproduce are stated above in the description, and are unique to
a particular setup of my network.  I believe this setup will be common in
intranet settings.

Actual Results:  see description

Expected Results:  it should just internally think of my server as
steavis.home.hacksciences.com if it has to (although i can't pretend to know
why, not a network programmer), but i should be able to browse just
http://steavis/* no problem, with no visible changes to me, the user.

Comment 1

[benc]

There are a couple things going on here, so I'll address them one at at time:

http://steavis.home.hacksciences.com/manual/

Your apache web server probably took the initial request and handed back a
re-direct (because "manual" probably does not exist as a URI, but as a
directory, most servers send back a re-direct to "manual/" and then server up a
directory listing in a page).

Check your apache logs.

Comment 2

[Michael Lefevre]

no response from reporter for >30 days, resolving as INVALID per comment 2.

reporter: if you can show that this isn't your Apache server performing the
redirect, please reopen this bug and give some more detail, but it sounds to me
as if Benjamin Chuang's description is correct, and therefore this is not a
mozilla bug.

Comment 3

[fillup]

Yes, I'm sorry I did not respond.  The diagnosis was correct by the other
person.  In fact, it came down to an incorrect entry in my reverse DNS, combined
with an unlucky setting in my Apache configuration file.

Many apologies.  Yes, this bug should be closed, and marked invalid.

Comment 4

[benc]

Oh, yeah. Okay, I understand what you are saying worked now (because you figured
out the second half of the problem from my partial answer).

For the record:

The redirect came back saying:

http://steavis.home.hacksciences.com/manual/

Which is why the URL bar changed, DNS failed (as the reporter says it isn't in
external DNS.

This happens more often with Windows servers, because they have a tendency to be
self-referential (rather than accepting explicit DNS configurations).

This also happens to be http. so... ->http, VERIFIED...