You get a blank screen because the web server you've connected to is waiting to get ah HTTP request from you. What you want to do is send the server you're telnetting to a valid HTTP request to see if you get a response back. The purpose of this is to see if 1) you can actually connect to the web server, 2) if the web server is listening and 3) if the traffic is making it back to you or not. It's, for all practical purposes, an HTTP ping. When you make a successful connection you can use a couple of different requests. The best for a simple test is to send a HEAD request: HEAD / HTTP/1.0 Host: remoteservernamehere User-Agent: Telnet <hit enter again> This should result in the server sending you back the typical response headers that it will send with as a successful response. You could also send a regular GET request: GET / HTTP/1.0 Host: remoteservernamehere User-Agent: Telnet <hit enter again> With this you will get back the response headers and the HTML of the home page of the server you're connecting to if things are working well. 2 CRLF's is the indication of the end of an HTTP request, that's why you have to hit enter twice to get any kind of response from the server. -Shawn ----- Shawn R. Quillman Robert Bosch Corporation RBNA/CIT1.1 38000 Hills Tech Drive Farmington Hills, MI 48331 (248) 553-1164 (P) (248) 848-2855 (F) shawn.quillman@xxxxxxxxxxxx -----Original Message----- From: William Robertson [mailto:robertson.william@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 6:43 AM To: [ISAserver.org Discussion List] Subject: [isalist] Telnet to Website - How is it meant to work? Hi there Often in troubleshooting comments are made to telnet into the problem website on port 80 to see if everything is fine. My question though is what am I supposed to see when I do this? If I successfully telnet to a website I am simply faced with a blank screen. If I press <ENTER> twice I then get the actual code for the error page. Here is an excerpt... HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request ( The data is invalid. ) Via:1.1 <SERVERNAME> Connection: close Proxy-Connection: close Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 3116 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML dir=ltr><HEAD><TITLE>The page cannot be displayed</TITLE> <STYLE>A:link { FONT: 8pt/11pt verdana; COLOR: #ff0000 } A:visited { FONT: 8pt/11pt verdana; COLOR: #4e4e4e } </STYLE> blah blah blah Does anyone have any advice on how I should be troubleshooting websites through a telnet session please? Cheers William R. _____ William Robertson AST Mpumalanga Systems House / Consultant: Software Tel: 013-2472703 / 083 638 0354 Fax: 013-2462236 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Everything in this e-mail and attachments relating to the official business of Columbus Stainless is proprietary to the company. It is confidential, legally privileged and protected by law. Columbus Stainless does not own and endorse any other content. Views and opinions are those of the sender unless clearly stated as being that of Columbus Stainless. The person addressed in the e-mail is the sole authorised recipient. Please notify the sender immediately if it has unintentionally reached you and do not read, disclose or use the content in any way. Whilst all reasonable steps are taken to ensure the accuracy and integrity of information and data transmitted electronically and to preserve the confidentiality thereof, no liability or responsibility whatsoever is accepted if information or data is,for whatever reason, corrupted or does not reach its intended destination. ---------------------------------------------------------------------