From: Chris Morris <chrismo@...>
Date: 2003-09-04T02:24:00+09:00
Subject: cgi bug? with iis 5 and nph

The 1.8 cgi module has the following bit:

    if options.delete("nph") or /IIS/n.match(env_table['SERVER_SOFTWARE'])
      buf += (env_table["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] or "HTTP/1.0")  + " " +
             (HTTP_STATUS[options["status"]] or options["status"] or 
"200 OK") +
             EOL +
             "Date: " + CGI::rfc1123_date(Time.now) + EOL

... which forces an HTTP status line in the response if IIS is the web 
server. But this is wrong (at least with IIS 5.0).

This script (sample.cgi.rb):

    require 'cgi'

    cgi = CGI.new("html3")
    cgi.out {
      cgi.html {
        cgi.body { 'hey'
        }
      }
    }

On IIS 5 generates this header:

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
    Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 17:07:57 GMT
    Connection: close
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 17:07:57 GMT
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html
    Content-Length: 84

If the file is renamed to 'nph-sample.cgi.rb' this flags IIS that it's a 
non parsed header script and then it works fine.

note: IE 6 and Mozilla 1.4 both are forgiving of the incorrect http 
response header, but Ruby's net/http is not:

    c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:1561:in `each_response_header':
    wrong header li
    ne format (Net::HTTPBadResponse)

Calling

     ENV['SERVER_SOFTWARE'] = ''

... before calling cgi.out seems to be a suitable workaround for now.

Can cgi.rb be changed to look for whatever version of IIS required this 
workaround, or changed to not do nph if SERVER_SOFTWARE =~ /IIS\/5.0/?

-- 

Chris
http://clabs.org/blogki