It works for me using a very old version of libwww. Headers:
GET http://ads.bfast.com/clients/etoys/dot_clear.gif HTTP/1.0
From: msimki@[hostname deleted for corporate policy reasons]
Host: ads.bfast.com
Pragma: no-cache
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.03 [en]
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Thu, 09 Dec 1999 22:14:37 GMT
Allow: GET, HEAD
Server: Oracle_Web_listener3.0.1.0.0/2.14FC1
Last-modified: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 16:30:59 GMT
Content-length: 49
Content-type: image/gif
Cache-control: public
Allow: GET, HEAD
Cache-last-checked: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 22:32:39 GMT
Is your problem persistent? I am not familiar with that
Oracle_Web_listener3.0.1.0.0/2.14FC1 server. Maybe it returns a 404 if it
can't read the database, it's too busy, has a headache, the number of seconds
since midnight divides evenly by 13, etc. etc. I've seen servers do flakey
things like that.
Also big sites sometimes have several servers responding to one hostname, and
maybe one server doesn't have a complete content set. If your clients cache IP
addresses (or query different DNS servers) one client could consistently be
connecting to the good server while another doesn't. This seems unlikely, but
conceivable. Maybe you could test this by using a raw IP address instead of
hostname.
Let us know what it turns out to be. :)
