HTTP Help: How to test HTTP using Telnet
Troubleshooting HTTP using telnet is a great way to review exactly what is getting returned to your browser.
This allows you to see headers and collect other information related to the web server.
Here is an example to build your telnet/HTTP connection from.
INPUT:
<![CDATA[
>telnet www.esqsoft.globalservers.com 80
]]>
Note: this launches telnet and tells it to look up and connect to the server for "www.esqsoft.globalservers.com" on port 80.
OUTPUT:
<![CDATA[
Trying 64.136.56.122...
Connected to www.esqsoft.globalservers.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
]]>
INPUT:
<![CDATA[
GET /index.htm HTTP/1.1
host: www.esqsoft.globalservers.com
<line feed>
]]>
Notes:
1) no OS cursor caret, the connection is open so you just get a blank line waiting for input.
2) need to hit twice after the "host:"
OUTPUT:
<![CDATA[
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 16:38:00 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.27 FrontPage/5.0.2.2623
Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 01:16:05 GMT
ETag: "158e008c-182c-40e365d5"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 6188
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
<html>
<head>
<title>...
...big long nasty HTML code here...
</body></html>
Connection closed by foreign host.
>
]]>
Other keywords and common mispellings: troubleshooting HTTP with Telnet