I got an interesting call from my boss yesterday. He asked, "What does a
code 205 mean?" When I pointed out that it'd depend on where he got the code
from, he told me it was from his Netscape browser. I then suggested that if
he kept reading along the same line, he'd get his answer, "DNS name lookup
failure." You have to explain stuff like this to Management sometimes, and
if you didn't, they'd not need us technical types I guess.
However, this got me to thinking, which beats working anytime, so I wrote the
following Perl snippet:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use HTTP::Status;
for (my $code = 0; $code < 1000; $code++) {
$msg = status_message($code);
print "$code $msg\n" if $msg;
}
The result told me that a 205 meant, "Reset Content". However, I tried
accessing a non-existent address with IE 5.5 and Netscape 4.6, the only two
browsers I've got, and both returned a 205 and "DNS lookup failure". I tried
LWP::UserAgent on a non-existent address and got, "500 Can't connect to
www.a.b.com:80 (Bad hostname 'www.a.b.com')". The same access, via a proxy
server, returned, "500 cache detected error".
So, is the message returned by HTTP::Status incorrect, or am I just missing
something?
Thanks,
Rodney
