Webmirror 2.0

directget full

       or

directget partial

Use this directive to specify whether the program should use full or partial URL in GET http request when asking web servers directly, without using a proxy server.

Since version 2.04 webmirror sends full URL to webservers when requesting a web page directly without proxy server. Using this keyword and specifying

directget partial

you can revert to the old method. You may need this feature if you want to mirror a very old webserver that can not handle the full URL.

The first line of a http request looks like

GET url HTT/1.0

where GET is a keyword, HTTP/1.0 specifies the protocoll and url is the actual url of thepage to be retrieved. The older implementations of browsers (IE2.0 and NC2.0 and before) sent relative URLs in request. It means that the request

GET /index.html HTTP/1.0

was requested from the machine www.emma.hu when retrieving http://www.emma.hu/index.html. This is OK so long as long the machine addressed host a single web. As the number of webs increased webhosting started to host many virtual webs on a single server. This was available by new browsers which sent the full URL to the webserver, in other words

GET http://www.emma.hu/index.html HTTP/1.0

was requested from the machine www.emma.hu. The webserver could decide which virtual web belongs to the request, although the request hit the same IP number.

By default webmirror sends the full URL, but you can ask it to send only the relative url, the old form.

As a matter of fact I can not imagine any other use of this feature than testing. TOC