One dot too many on link to domain

No way to detect?

[Gede]

Hi,

somebody linked to me with link like this:

www. domain . com./

Note the extra dot, after com

On my home server (Win32) the extra dot is passed through in the HTTP_HOST var, but on the linux servers, it is not, as it seems, it just gives the domain without the dot.

So I can not detect and redirect :(

I tried by Apache rewrite and PHP...

This can be used as some sort of SE sabotage method, I guess, how can I detect this?

The only way seems now to use the full path in internal links, so only one page can be affected...

thanks,

Gede

same on this server:

[webmasterworld.com....]

[edited by: Gede at 7:22 am (utc) on June 18, 2007]

[DamonHD]

Formally, the extra dot on the end is correct and *required* in some cases, but almost all applications understand the implicit dot at the end and understand that the versions with and without the dot are identical, just as host names are not case-sensitive.

So it shouldn't hurt or help you with the SEs for example.

Rgds

Damon

[Gede]

Hmmm...

I doubt if it doesn't have influence.

As far as I can tell, it can be so that a whole domain is indexed twice because of the extra dot.

[Gede]

Ah,

Apache on *nix systems does see the dot after the com.

I am behind a transparent squid proxy, and I guess something funny happens there.

[jdMorgan]

I'd ask you to test once more, very carefully --flushing caches and all that-- on your Linux server. I've used a test on HTTP_HOST to redirect both 'trailing-dot' and 'appended-port' hostnames for several years without problems. I'm sure it works on FreeBSD, Unix, and RedHat Linux, on versions of Apache from 1.3.27 through at least 1.3.37 (I just re-checked them).

If there is a problem, it may be specific to a particular version of Apache and/or *nix. It would be useful to find out if this is the case.

[added] Cross-posted with the above while taking a phone call...[/added]

Jim

[edited by: jdMorgan at 12:47 pm (utc) on June 18, 2007]

[Gede]

Yes, it works alright.

I was about to get very angry with "my" server admin, he didn't see the problem, and I already had put the rewrite in place, but didn't see it work...

It is the squid proxy that filters the trailing dot...

I cannot turn off the proxy, I am on satellite :(

[jdMorgan]

Yes, this can be a problem when testing. Some proxies will drop the trailing dot, and most modern browsers will drop the port number if you type "example.com:80/". Even though I'm no longer on satellite (I moved to fixed wireless when it became available to eliminate the 480mSec round-trip satellite latency), I have to use Netscape 4.x to test the appended-port-80 URLs.

Jim