Page not viewable in Safari

Another BS response. After they have already admitted that it is a problem with a vendor that they use for their service, this reponse claims that it is a problem with Safari and they cannot rewrite the way Safari was written to fix the problem....

I have decided to leave GD regardless of what happens.

Hello everyone... I attempted to post a letter a couple of days ago on Bob Parson's 'time saving tips' blog thinking it might bring some attention somehow to the issue. While it didn't make the cut (they are screened), I did get a response:

Bob,

I writing here b/c your staffing dept. isn't responding to our problems and theres no forum for godaddy.

We as your customers have a more serious problem than just 'time constraints'. Our domain names, hosted with your company, aren't being forwarded in Safari (a major browser in the market) for more than 2 weeks now! They are coming up blank. Godaddy has denied all responsibity, saying its Safari's problem. It seems to be yours and theirs. Check this post here to see why:

http://www.realmacsoftware.com/support/viewtopic.php?id=3271&p=2

Could you address or even acknowledge this problem before you make another blog post? This is serious, and directly relates to why we've chosen Godaddy as a domain name provider as well as your success.

Very frustrating.

____

Dear Drew,

Thank you for your interest in Mr. Parsons blog.

We currently are working with Apple and another vendor to find a resolution to this issue. We are sorry for any trouble this might be causing for you.

If our office can be of any assistance to you in the future, please let us know.

Kindest regards,

Jonathan Davis
Office of the President
President@GoDaddy.com


Well Folks...at least they are aknowledging it at this point, and (hopefully) doing something about it. Although as others have mentioned, they still seem to be playing the blame game. If the problem is with one of THEIR vendors, then isn't that THEIR problem and not Apple's?

In any case, I'd like to bring up the very real question of how and when we should get a letter together for people to sign in order to put pressure on this issue. I have 5 domain names with them as well the fact I have referred over 10 and am in the process of placing more. If we made a letter with a list of everyone who 'signs' and their associated domain names (and count) maybe this could provide an even more 'squekier wheel'. Question is, do we give them a little more grace and see what happens, or should we work on this ASAP? I'd like to hear what everyone thinks, and if the time is indeed apt then I wouldn't mind helping see this idea take life.

-Drew

If you don't mind composing the letter I say do it now. We can wait a few days to see if they get a fix, but during that time we can get names and stuff together. We cannot compose a letter and get it out tonight with everyones info even if we wanted to.

I would take charge of the letter and send it with everyones info, but since I am actually with a subsidiary of GD I think it would be better with someone who is straight with them.

Anyway, if you want to do it, I am all for it. We can start to get it together and that way we are giving them a little more time to get it resolved.

Here is my info to add to the letter:

Byron Shaheen

texasstarscapes.com
martines-hair-at-home.com
my-macpro.com
flaminstoopid.com

and I have 3 more waiting for this to get resolved.

If we watch this from tcp, I think we can figure out what is happening, and I am almost certain, that in my experience, with redirects, GoDaddy is clearly at fault here.

Here is the tcp data from the first linked site:
(stripping non important ack/syn start of transaction)

ACK PUSH
GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: /
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/416.12
(KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/416.13
Connection: keep-alive
Host: www.catalogueofships.com

Packet received at 1134084628.096297
TCP packet from 64.202.167.129:http(80) to 192.168.1.101:49928 (73 bytes)
FIN ACK
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Content-Length: 0
Location: /?ABCDEFGH

This is standard http 302 temporary redirect. Now, we could argue that they should probably use 301 permanent redirect, so the search engines actually index the redirected to page, but that would not solve this. FYI, in most all cases, a 302 redirect will be ignored by search engines, as it is a temporary status code, one to be removed soon, ie: server too busy, look elsewhere.

Anyway, the location field is the key /?ABCDEFGH is a valid URI, but that is about it, and in all my development, I have always learned you need to use a FQDN in the location field of an http header.

RFC on the matter, is a little vague and I can not fully interpret it:
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/about/tools/rfc2616-10.html

I think this is the important part
If the 302 status code is received in response to a request other
than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the
request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might
change the conditions under which the request was issued.

Now, they are sending a valid GET, so it should not apply, but for some reason, I have a feeling this is what is happening.

If I make my own 302 redirect, and watch that, for example;
TCP packet from ip.add.re.ss:http(80) to 192.168.1.101:50246 (113 bytes)
ACK PUSH
HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: myserver
MIME-Version: 1.0
Location: http://www.amazon.com/foo

Look at the location field, it is a FQDN and URI.

I looked in the webkit bugzilla and see no one has reported this, this would be the best way to get an answer for real, so I posted it here:
http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6016

Using the built in feedback mechanisms in OS X probably wont do much good at getting an answer in a timely fashion, the bug tracker certainly has for me in the past.

btw...

isn't it sad that http://digg.com/topstories is no longer showing our post there EVEN if we have almost 2000 votes??

I can't even find it anymore...

It's still there. It is called something like GoDaddy hates mac users.

Go to the weeks top diggs and it is like 4 down.

http://digg.com/topstories/thisweek

Yeah, it's there. It'd be cool if the story was picked for diggnation. They might have a little insight to the problem, with their relationship with GoDaddy-- maybe offer a more concise answer. Unless, they don't pick it for that reason.

First off, the page is a simple blogger page found at
http://www.catalogueofships.com

From a little investigation from connecting to this server manually with telnet I've found what I believe to be the cause of the problem.. The server is not correctly following the HTTP specification. I see 2 violations.

The first is it does not wait for 2 Carriage Return/Line Feed combinations before sending a response which is probably causeing the blank page in safari and opera as the client browser is still trying to send client headers (User Agent, Host, Etag, cache checks etc...).

The second is the Location: redirect response header is incorrectly formatted as it does not include the full URL. a Location: header is REQUIRED to have the full http://www.catalogueofships.com/?ABCDEFGH

The Correct negotiation is supposed to be (C: to the server S: from the server)

C:GET / HTTP/1.1
C:User-Agent: My Web Browser/1.1
C:Host: www.catalogueofships.com
C:
S:HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
S:Content-Length: 0
S:Location: http://www.catalogueofships.com/?ABCDEFGH


Where as the actual negotation is

C:GET / HTTP/1.1
S:HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
S:Content-Length: 0
S:Location: /?ABCDEFGH

This IS an issue with Godaddy as they are incorrectly supporting the HTTP specification.


macMini 1.25GHz Mac OS X (10.4.1)

Fellow web-designers, developers, and mac users,

The way godaddy's representatives have been responding has been very childish, unproffessional, uninformed, unhelpful, and just plain deceptive in nature. There is obviously a problem on their end, or at least a responsibility but they have denied both. We are paying them for one thing: a domain name. If this one thing we are paying them for isn't working and they don't seem willing to fix it, then why should we keep giving them our money?

I think we should start writing this 'letter' of sorts to make it clear to godaddy that the apple community is a viable source of his company's success/revenue, that our valid concerns need to be addressed in a professional and quick manner, and that if they are not we will most likely choose to host elsewhere resulting in a loss of godaddy's business.

I propose creating a simple website (3 pages) that would allow anyone to add their name to our letter, including a list of the domain names they currently own/host through godaddy. I could accomplish this by inserting user given information into a database through a simple form, and then calling the data for display on another page.

My questions are:

1) Anyone have server space/ plus simple SQL database (preferably NOT godaddy) from which we could host this on?
2) What about the actual, ahem, domain name?
3) Would there be any privacy issues with placing a user's name with their associated websites? I'm assuming not since this information is often already available by the WHOIS lookup service. Am I correct in this?

Other than those 3 questions/issues, I'm ready to write the letter w/the addition of our collective findings as well as code up the pages. Let's roll.

-Drew

I am all for it. I don't have any of the stuff for doing the site.

If we did not do a site, I could send you a gmail invite and you could create an email for just this. We could call it something like nogodaddy@gmail.com or something. We could have everyone send their info to that email and then send the letter that way. We could even send it from that email address. That way, since we would have everyones email address that sends in information, we could also copy all communications to everyone in the group.

let me know if you want the invite for gmail.

Otherwise the website idea sounds good to me as well. I just don't know how fast we could get that up and going. With the email thing we could start collecting info in about 10 mins.

Interesting. I almost want to say wait a day or two, since a few have received the promising letter that they are aware of the problem on their end (or their "vendor's" end) and see if they come through with a fix.

I agree though. The previous responses by GoDaddy have been more frustrating than the problem itself.

[ Edited by Apple Discussions Moderator ]

Well, I think the idea is to collect info for a couple of days and if there is no progress send the letter with the information we have collected. They would have time to fix it while we would be collecting information.

Even if they fix it while we are collecting information, I think we should still send something about how they treated this situation as if we were a bunch of idiots that had no clue or insight as to what may have been going on. On top of that their responses were outright lies.

We are all going on 3 weeks with our service being down. If we were 3 weeks late renewing our domain fees we would have already lost our domain names. That is their right to do in a business contract, but what rights do we have when we pay for a service and do not get that service for weeks? What rights do we have when we are lied to about it all? NONE, apparently we just have to deal with it.

I think either way we need to make some kind of statement about the situation. They need to know that it is not acceptable. We the consumer, who puts money in their pockets, deserve better.

I'm having this exact same problem. I have about 20 GoDaddy.com domains set to forward, and none of them are forwarding correctly (at all actually). Very weird, no?

An example is studiokiwi.com. It should forward to www.kiwitogo.com, but instead, Safari opens a blank page.

As others have reported, if I load the domain using another browser first (IE or Firefox), Safari is able to forward successfully.

Just my two cents. I have reported a couple of the bugs to Apple.

[ Edited by Apple Discussions Moderator ]

Looks like this threads very own ZackMac managed to get the issue onto Slashdot:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/08/236246&from=rss

Good work!