200 - (more)...

[Andrew Wilson <an...@aaaaaaaa.demon.co.uk>]

More on the '200 -' weirdness.  I recompiled 1.2-dev with a module
that just prints the headers received and sent for each request,
and at the same time faked an If-modified-since: request from a
mythical client.

Here's the faked request:

    1> telnet 127.0.0.1 80
    Trying 127.0.0.1...
    Connected to 127.0.0.1.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    GET /User/Andrew.Wilson/Slider/ HTTP/1.0
    If-Modified-Since: Monday, 21-Oct-96 16:22:54 GMT
    User-Agent: Mozilla/1.1N (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1.5-STABLE i386)
    Accept: */*, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg

    HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
    Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 18:53:51 GMT
    Server: Apache/1.2-dev
    ETag: "2b11e-60c-0"
    Connection: close

    Connection closed by foreign host.
    2> 

Which tells us that when a client requests a resource for which it
already has a copy, and that copy is identical to the server's copy
then the server responds 304 Not Modified.  This is cool.

Here's the access_log entry for this same request (scuse my linewrap):

    localhost - - [26/Oct/1996:19:54:17 +0100] "GET /User/Andrew.Wilson/Slider/ HTTP/1.0" 200 -

We see the big bad '200 -', ummm.

Ay.