The Server Snooper
When you want to know what type of server your competitors
use for their domains, or your friend across town, who you
gonna call?
WillMaster, of course.
Simply point your browser to
Server Snooper
. At
the Server Snooper page, type in the URL of the domain in
question.
It will generate a short report of information. Some of the
information may be things you never knew was available.
It's a great research tool, or a time waster, depending on
how you look at it.
Since playing with this new tool, I've found that some
servers provide more information than others do. Some
information is consistently provided. Other information
only sometimes.
You can tell whether or not a redirector is in place by
typing a URL of a web page that does not exist. If the
resulting information includes a 307, 302, or 301 status
code, it is evidence of a redirector.
Sometimes servers will report the date a web page was last
modified. (How often do your competitors update their web
pages?)
With some servers, you'll get the last modified date only
for static pages. Pages containing SSI or PHP code might
not be considered static, as they can be modified on the
fly. If a certain server won't report even for static
pages, try typing in just the domain name. You might then
get the last modified date for the default page, even
though the default page file name was not provided.
Don't know the operating system your web site is running
on, and you wonder whether or not your web site can run the
Master Series scripts? Simply type your domain name and see
what your server reports.
If the "Server" line says Unix or Linux, or mentions a
common Unix or Linux distribution, like FreeBSD or Red Hat,
your site qualifies.
Developers and programmers, use this tool to see information
your web pages and scripts are actually sending to web
browsers.
How To Read the Server Snooper Report
For reference, we'll use this report from the server at URL
http://www.bontragercgi.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 21:27:19 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 [...]
Last-Modified: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 07:18:16 GMT
ETag: "73c54a-22a3-44ded238"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 8867
Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
The first line of the Server Snooper report contains the
HTTP version the server is using (usually 1.0 or 1.1) and
the status code of the server's reply.
If the web page exists at the URL you provided, the status
code will be "200 OK." Some other status codes you might
see are "301 Moved Permanently," "302 Found,"
"307 Temporary Redirect," "403 Forbidden," "404 Not Found,"
"410 Gone," and "500 Internal Server Error."
After the first line, the rest of the lines are name/value
pairs separated with a colon character.
The Date line has been on every report I've obtained. It is
the date and time the report was provided, usually expressed
in Greenwich Mean Time. While you already know what time it
is, and don't need that information, programmers can use the
Server Snooper report to calculate the difference between
their server's clock time and that of the remote server.
More interesting to you, probably, is when a Last-Modified
line is on the report. The date/time on that line can be
subtracted from the date/time on the Date line. The result
is the number of days, hours, and even seconds that have
elapsed since the document was last modified.
When the above Server Snooper report was obtained, the time
elapsed since the document's last modification was 14 hours,
9 minutes, and 3 seconds.
Most, but not all, reports have a Server line. In the above
Server Snooper report, the server line was cropped to fit
within established ezine margins for articles.
If you're curious what the entire Server line was, type
http://www.bontragercgi.com/ at the Server Snooper page.
The Server line sometimes contains little information and
sometimes a lot. Usually, there is enough information to
determine what operating system the server is running on.
The ETag line, when present, is a series of characters
between quotation marks that represent the latest version
of the document. This can be used by software for sending
conditional GETs (conditionally requesting a document). If
the ETag is the same as the current document, the current
document is not provided again. This can be used by RSS
readers, for example, to eliminate unnecessary downloads.
Between the Accept-Ranges line and the Content-Length line,
you know that the document is 8867 bytes long.
After the document was sent by the server it closed the
connection (Connection line). And the type of document
that was sent (the Content-Type line) is text html.
Not all possible data lines are in the above example report.
As you use the Server Snooper, you'll see others.
The Set-Cookie line, for example, reveals what cookies are
set prior to a page loading. (Cookies set after a page loads
will not be revealed in the Server Snooper report.)
As you now understand, the savvy snooper can sometimes find
out a lot about the server any domain is hosted on.
Will Bontrager
©2006 Bontrager Connection, LLC
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