NYCPHP Meetup

[Andrew M. Yochum]

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Ian Forsyth wrote:

> I never had a problem till, some one at BigBank.com went to look at the site
> from their office and they went in an infinte loop always going to the
> splash page, and this happened at several computers on the same network at
> bigbank.com .. for some reason the http_referer from the client could not be
> captured..
> 
> did this happen because some particular firewall filtering? Whats up with
> that?

Sounds like a proxy server, most likely, intercepting the requests and
suppressing the Referer header being sent by the client.

Also, unfortunately, the Referer header can't be relied on.  Not all
clients support it, and some give the option of disabling it for
security/privacy concerns.

See:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.36
and
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec15.html#sec15.1.3

Andrew