204430 - DNS: local domain checking causes name-based virtual host addresses to fail

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 177919

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Bradley Dean]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020607
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020607

By 'dns local domain checking' I mean configuration of a system such that it
will automatically append a local domain to the end of a hostname lookup if it
fails (so I can type in just short hostnames for local machines).

The scenario is this - if a person enters something like http://www as the
location the first DNS access will almost certainly fail. However if foo.org is
listed as one of my local domains, the call to gethostbyname will then try
www.foo.org, which then succeeds.

The problem is this - at this stage Mozilla sends a request to whatever IP
address resolved to www.foo.org, but the host header is "Host: www" which will
fail if www.foo.org is a name-based virtual host (and it is not the default
virtual host for that web server)

Note that if mozilla is configured to send the request to a proxy cache this
does not necessarily happen because the proxy handles the DNS request, not
mozilla/the local workstation.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Configure workstation (ie *nix /etc/resolv.conf) to include a local domain,
preferrable this local domain should include a web server at an address like
www.foo.org (the local domain should be set to foo.org)
2.Turn off proxy caching in mozilla
3.Make an access to http://www/

Actual Results:  
DNS request fails of www and then is tried with local domain appended (which
succeeds) - once this is done a request is sent to the web server with Host
header: "Host: www" which is incorrect


Expected Results:  
Mozilla should extract the hostname from the response from gethostbyname and
compare it against the name requested, if a domain has been appended this should
be determinable and mozilla should append this domain to the Host: header sent
to th web server.

Note - a web site authority may just be an alias for the actual web server (at
which stage a CNAME record is the result of the DNS lookup) - in this case the
domain of the alias, not the final 'real' web server address needs to be used.

This problem appears to exist in other web clients but I have only really tested
it with mozilla and cURL. (both mozilla and cURL show the same behaviour)

Comment 1

[Bradley Dean]

I have just heard back from one of my users that they have seen this problem on
"various versions of IE and Mozilla" so it seems to be fairly across-the-board
sort of behaviour.

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

I think it's a dupe of bug 177919 (see comment 5 and 7). Reporter, please reopen
if you don't agree.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 177919 ***

Comment 3

[benc]

VERIFIED/dupe: 
let's clarify though... we are complaining that the "Host:" line sent by mozilla
is wrong.

Comment 4

[Bradley Dean]

benc: Yes - mozilla will send the exact authority entered in the location field,
despite this authority possibly being auto-completed wih a 'local' domain name
by the call to gethostbyname.