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When a user hits my SSL/TLS only server at port 80, should I advertise Upgrade Required (426) or redirect with Moved Permanently (301)?

What are the drawbacks and benefits of each approach?

As far as I can tell, all modern browsers support TLS upgrades. However, I see that w3m, lynx, etc, don't; neither do curl, wget, and various robots.

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Are you talking about what happens when a user hits the server via unencrypted HTTP? – BenGC Jul 13 '11 at 1:14
Yes, I'll update the question. – psilva Jul 13 '11 at 1:15

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up vote 6 down vote accepted

It looks like a 426 should only be thrown if you actually tried negotiating for TLS and it failed. Because the user only used HTTP, we don't yet know their SSL capabilities so what you would want to do is 301 the user to HTTPS, and then if they are unable to handle TLS, you throw a 426.

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