186639 - web500.com - serverside detection busted

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: Danish, defect)

Description

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

identifies Mozilla as Netscape 4.x

try spoofing Mozilla as MSIE and see the difference

If they get their system in order a whole lot of sites ought to be fixed, as
they are the originator for a tool used on a lot of websites.

see bug #185766 & bug 185767
These bugs are the reason I found this site

I'll attach two screenshots:
one with Mozilla as user agent, one with MSIE as user agent

Comment 1

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

Attachment: screenshot with Mozilla userAgent

user agent string used:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; da-DK; rv:1.3b; MultiZilla
v1.1.33 (a)) Gecko/20021223
This is also how the websites in bug 185766 & bug 185767 behave

Comment 2

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

Attachment: screenshot with MSIE userAgent & Mozilla cookie

user agent string used:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
this is also how the website in bug #185767 behaves
the website in bug #185766 works perfectly with user agent spoofing

Comment 3

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

OK - this is a danish company.
Do you have a Dane that can contact them ???
Otherwise, I'll be happy trying to contact them.

I know there's a form letter or something tech evangelism uses.
Please give me directions on the form you'll want my contact to take.

Comment 4

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

workaround:
Finally solved why these sites sometimes worked with user agent spoofing and
sometimes not:

You can get the websites depending on this tool to work under the following
circumstances:
1) set the user agent to some kind of MISE 6
2) delete all cookies set by the site
3) (re)load the page !BUT! be sure *only* to have the server name in the URL bar

Of course this is not an acceptable workaround as it involves user agent spoofing

Comment 5

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

Attachment: screenshot with MSIE userAgent & no cookie

this is a screenshot of the frontpage with user agent spoofing to MSIE 6 and
making sure no cookies were present before entering the website

Comment 6

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

contact established.
according to the contact person, the newest version ought to correct this
problem and it seems so : try http://www.uni2.dk/ , so as their customers
upgrades this ought to fix itself automagically. I'll keep an eye on things
periodically.

Comment 7

[Frankie]

All Web500 CMS sites behave the same in Windows and Mac versions of Mozilla.

Comment 8

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

I read somewhere, that in a situation like this, one should
1) file a bug against the tool
2) file bugs against all websites using the tool

Do you want me to track down all sites still using older versions of this tool
and file bugs against these ???

By the way, why don't they update their own site when a fix is available ???

Comment 9

[Mathieu Pillard [:mat]]

Bjarne: thats what we do. 
see bug 85104  for instance.

Comment 10

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

workaround - updated
1) use the cookie manager to delete all cookies set by the site
2) spoof the user agent to MSIE 6
3) reload the main URL *without* anything else attached to it
4) reset your user agent to Mozilla

Seems, that once sites using this tool has set their session cookies, they no
longer do any checking on the user agent. Thus, except for the main page we are
able to browse as ourselves and will thus turn up as Mozilla in the user agent
logs :-)

Comment 11

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

OK - I've been through all sites on this page :
http://www.web500.com/tempfiles/120.asp
which is a list of references, as well as the recent news about new customers

Schedule : 
1) translate the evangelism form letter into danish
   ought to have been accomplished over this weekend
2) go through the sites one at a time but at most one a day

I've reassigned the bug to myself, as I've had personal contact with them

Comment 12

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

other

Comment 13

[Bjarne D Mathiesen]

OK - they have fixed their own homepage
It now works in both Mozilla 1.6a and Safari on Mac OS X 10.2.8

Comment 14

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

fixed