Hi,

we have a strange symptom after an upgrade from Tomcat 8 to Tomcat 9, because 
we get a 403 for a call that works flawlessly with the previous version.

Let's describe the scenario: We have a customer with a Wordpress application 
hosted on an Apache server. Some pages perform XMLHttpRequests to load and 
embed HTML snippets from other sources. One such source is our (load-balanced) 
web application running on Tomcat. These requests are using GET or POST, 
depending on the situation. However, after the switch from Tomcat 8 to Tomcat 
9, the GET request is replied by Tomcat with 403. And the only trace is an 
entry in the access_log. However, if we use the request URL directly in the 
browser, the call succeeds.

We are using a vanilla installation of Tomcat. The load-balancer will map the 
HTTPS calls on port 443 to HTTP on port 8080. The only modification to the 
configuration is in catalina.properties, where we skip the jar scanning:

- tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToSkip=*

And we have some additional attributes at the connector in the server.xml:

  <Connector
    port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
    connectionTimeout="20000"
    redirectPort="8443" 
    maxThreads="1000"  
    acceptCount="400"
    allowHostHeaderMismatch="true" />

Originally we suspected the "allowHostHeaderMismatch" attribute, because it 
changed its default from true in Tomcat 8 to false in Tomcat 9, but it had no 
effect on the communication

If we look at the network analysis in the browser, we have following request 
parameters (example):

====== %< ====
GET https://tomcat.test-server.local/app/service?param=1

The HTTP request header contains:
- Host: tomcat.test-server.local
- Origin: https://www.test-server.local
- Referrer: https://www.test-server.local/
- DNT: 1

The HTTP response header contains:
- Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
- Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://www.test-server.local
- Cache-Control: no-cache
- Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
- Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
- Transfer-Encoding: chunked
====== %< ====

We found the switched default for "allowHostHeaderMismatch" by chance. Are 
there other parameters in the Tomcat configuration that are new or have changed 
their default, which may influence this communication?

What's the best way to analyze this on the Tomcat side? Are there any special 
logger settings to get more info about this 403?

Regards,
Jörg



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org

Reply via email to