Hi Ian,
I am not a web developer, but…
On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 10:35:20AM +0000, Ian Hobson wrote:
A website on my VPS has been receiving HEAD requests,
which cause it to fail, and are cluttering up my error logs.
I don't think that, standards-wise, a HEAD request should fail if a
GET request would not fail.
The purpose of a HEAD request is to "see what would happen" if a GET
request was done, e.g. check if the resource is actually there, what
its size is, when it was last modified, etc., without actually
having to receive the entire content in response.
For example, software that checks for broken links on a web site
might send a HEAD request to each link to see if it still exists.
They are coming from IPs all over the place, but only
a few (3 to 5) a day.
What would generate them?
It probably isn't for your benefit, but I'm guessing that it's
something which has archived your site and is checking if what it
has in its archive is still current.
How should the software respond?
It should do whatever it does for a GET of the same resource, but
not send the content.
Unless it's obviously abusive I wouldn't be concerning myself over 5
requests a day, but I might be wondering why my software objects to
them.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting