HTTP Help: How to test HTTP using Telnet

Troubleshooting HTTP using telnet is a great way to review exactly what is getting
returned to your browser. This allows you to see headers and collect other information
related to the web server.

Here is an example to build your telnet/HTTP connection from.

INPUT:
>telnet www.esqsoft.globalservers.com 80
Note: this launches telnet and tells it to look up and connect to the server
for "www.esqsoft.globalservers.com" on port 80.

OUTPUT:

Trying 64.136.56.122... 
Connected to www.esqsoft.globalservers.com. 
Escape character is '^]'.

INPUT:

GET /index.htm HTTP/1.1
host: www.esqsoft.globalservers.com

Notes:
1) no OS cursor caret, the connection is open so you just get a blank line waiting for input.
2) need to hit {Enter} twice after the "host:"

OUTPUT:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 16:38:00 GMT 
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6 
 PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.27 FrontPage/5.0.2.2623 Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 01:16:05 GMT 
ETag: "158e008c-182c-40e365d5" 
Accept-Ranges: bytes 
Content-Length: 6188 
Connection: close 
Content-Type: text/html