http headers differ on my sites

Differing responses when checking http headers

[Ogdeni]

Hi there,

I'm hoping somebody can answer my question, I have 2 websites both similar in terms of hosting platforms.

One returns very few responses from a http header test:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>
Content-Type => text/html
Server => Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:15:43 GMT
Connection => close

The other is much more "talkative":

HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>
Content-Length => 57776
Content-Type => text/html
Content-Location => http://www.example.com/index.html
Last-Modified => Fri, 31 Aug 2007 07:41:20 GMT
Accept-Ranges => bytes
ETag => "76e4a052a2ebc71:647"
Server => Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
PICS-Label => (PICS-1.0 "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l by "howard@*******" on "2006.10.13T18:32+0100" exp "2007.10.13T12:00+0100" r (v 0 s 0 n 0 l 0))
Date => Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:15:37 GMT
Connection => close

Both these tests were done on the root of the domain, without the index.htm(l) added, however the results were the same if the full url was given.

The difference in responses concerns me, is it important to return content-length, content-location, ETag(?) and PICS-Label? I'd really appreciate some advice.

Thanks!

[londrum]

the servers are probably just set up differently. but you can add headers to your pages yourself, it's easy enough. if you know a little php it's just a simple matter of adding a line like:

<?php header('Expires: Thu, 31 Dec 1999 23:59:59 GMT');?>

it's different for different headers though. have a read through the php manual at php.net

[Ogdeni]

Thank you Londrum,

I know a bit about PHP so that's cool I would have no problem doing that.

However, what I am really interested to know is why? What configuration options in IIS would make the difference?

I want the servers to be configured almost identically and, as far as I can see they are, so i am confused as to why the http headers differ.

Thanks again!

[jdMorgan]

IIS is not my forte, but I'd like to comment that you should seek to make the first server's response more like the second; Due the the "Last-Modified" header, the second server's response is cacheable, while the first server's is not. Therefore, you'll either burn a lot more bandwidth on that first server, or have problems with stale cached pages, because you're leaving it up to the client (browser or robot) to determine when and if it should re-fetch the page.

You also might want to ask "howard" about the PICS labeling, which is related to the "parental controls" in IE.

Jim