nginx/1.3.2 - 4xx responses are returned without HTTP headers, bug?

[Sjon Hortensius]

On 07/09/2012 11:52 AM, Maxim Dounin wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On Mon, Jul 09, 2012 at 10:41:19AM +0200, Sjon Hortensius wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I think I stumbled upon a bug in nginx but I would like to get
>> someone else's opinion on this.
>>
>> It seems all 4xx errors are not prefixed by headers in HTTP
>> responses. I have a simple test-script in bash which you can run to
>> verify this behavior:
>>
>> function req { echo -n "GET /bugtest?id="; for i in `seq 15000
>> 17100` ; do echo -n "%7C$i" ; done ; echo -en "HTTP/1.1\nUser-Agent:
>> Mozilla/5.0\nConnection: Close\nHost: wiki.nginx.org\r\n\r\n" ; } ;
>> req | nc wiki.nginx.org 80
>>
>> I can also reproduce this for other 4xx responses. My interpretation
>> of the RFC is that this is unwanted, see
>> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-6.1
>
> Headers aren't sent if nginx assumes the request is in HTTP/0.9
> format.  The above script makes nginx to think it's HTTP/0.9 as
> uri used dosn't fit into header buffer and nginx isn't able to
> see "HTTP/1.1" before it returns 414.
>
> Maxim Dounin

Thanks for your reply! I have been looking for RFC documents describing 
the maximum request-length in HTTP/0.9, but I cannot find any. I found 
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Request.html (which links to 
http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html to describe URLs) and 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt, both of which describe no maximum 
length.

If nginx assumes HTTP/0.9 for the request, it doesn't seem very logical 
to return an error which cannot exist within that very protocol?

--

Regards,

Sjon Hortensius

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