Technical question regarding Netscape Communicator 4.7x

[MrChad]

I'm trying to debug a web application for a client, and I've run into a strange error. I've googled this problem multiple times but I've come up empty.

The problem stems from an integration of our product with some third-party software. Our application sets a cookie, the third-party application reads and updates the cookie, then we read the updated cookie. Both our app and the third-party app are hosted in the same domain (web.server.company.com), and both are writing to the same cookie domain (.server.company.com). The whole process runs flawlessly in Internet Explorer and Netscape 7.01, but it fails in Netscape 4.7x. Specifically, the third-party app can read the cookie that our app sets, but we are unable to read any updates that it sets.

I enabled cookie prompting in Netscape and discovered something strange. When our application sets the cookie, the cookie prompt says "The server web.server.company.com wishes to set a cookie that will be sent to any server in the domain .server.company.com." However, when the third-party app updates the cookie, the message says "The server 17 wishes to set a cookie that will be sent back only to itself." The number (17) changes each time I test the integration (it varies between 17, 22, 25, 18 and some others). This would sort of explain why our app (on web.server.company.com) cannot read the updated cookie (on 17). My question is, where is this number coming from? I would imagine that it comes from document.domain or some portion of the HTTP header, but I'm not sure. The client insists that there is no proxy involved here, and updating the browser is not an option. Can anyone help me out?

 

[manly]

You want to snoop the actual HTTP Set-Cookie headers received by Netscape. I used to do involving cookies, and I never noticed NS 4.x violating the de facto cookie spec in any way. I say de facto spec because the original Netscape cookie spec is ancient, and AFAIK there was never an official update. At the time, I think the W3C had just added cookies to the HTTP spec, but nobody actually implemented the standard yet (I don't recall why). But since cookies are such a small, well-defined feature, it wasn't something that different HTTP clients were differentiating in. Netscape invented cookies, and MS and others just copied the interface verbatim.

Some people like to use a general network packet sniffer that understands HTTP. I'm sure there are web proxies out there specifically designed to log at the HTTP level for programmers to debug web apps.

If possible, you could even just telnet to port 80 (whereever the 3rd party service is running) and manually check.