From: Todd Gillespie <toddg@...128.ma.utexas.edu>
Date: 2001-08-07T03:00:46+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19243] Re: http: "hi, my name is"-message

Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> wrote:
: AFAIK: When I go to a website with Mozilla, it tells the server it's
: name: Mozilla Version blah and more.
: When I download stuff from a webserver with Ruby, what does Ruby tell
: the server? How can I find that out? How can I customize the message?
: What is the name of the message? (is it the header of the http request?)

It tells the server something like this:

GET /somefile HTTP/1.1
Host: www.name.of.the.server 
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.73 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.4.5 i686; Nav)
Accept: */*

The User-Agent line is the one you need to futz with.  I don't have Ruby
on hand so I can't tell you where to find the appropriate call.
If you give up and just use raw sockets, remember to keep the Host: param
-- it's not valid HTTP/1.1 without it.