Issuing GET via Telnet to WAS 6.1 has HTTP 505 response

Question

I'm working with our network team to configure layer 7 healthchecking for a WAS 6.1 system.

We're proving the connection in a similar manner to how the device will check it, by opening a telnet on the correct IP and port and then issuing a GET request e.g.

GET /path/index.html

When used with IIS the server handles this and responds with a 200

When used with the WAS 6.1 system, the server responds with a 505 unknown protocol.

If I add the HTTP version to the request it completes correctly e.g.

GET /path/index.html HTTP/1.1

however this seems to cause other problems for the network team so I'm trying to understand why WAS responds in this manner compared with other web-servers

Answer 1

Technically, the HTTP version is not optional with HTTP 1.0/1.1. IIS responds to requests without it for HTTP 0.9 compatibility. Some servers are more picky.

RFC2068 - Specifically:

Request-Line   = Method SP Request-URI SP HTTP-Version CRLF