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Joe Harris, CCIE No. 6200 (R&S, Security & SP) is a Systems Engineer with Cisco Systems® specializing in Security. In addition to authoring Cisco Network Security Little Black Book, Joe has also been a technical reviewer for several Cisco Press publications and written articles, white papers, and presentations on various security technologies. He also assists various Certification Partners by beta testing their newest CCIE certification workbooks and has been recognized by Cisco as an SE Wall of Fame award winner.

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HTTP Troubleshooting Tool

October 24th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

Many times throughout the day, I get tasked with helping customers trace and troubleshoot HTTP issues related to their firewall implementations. Some these issues may be related to application layer protocol inspection features that the ASA/PIX provide and the customer may or may not have enabled. On other occasions it could be issues with how traffic is received at the firewall on its way to the target server that is located in the DMZ or inside network(s) and vice versa. In most of the instances the traffic is http or https traffic and I need a way to see what the end host, server or firewall is seeing in relation to what is actually requested or being responded to. I use a little tool that has worked wonders for me over the years and I wanted to pass it along to you. It’s called httpwatch and it is an HTTP viewer and debugger that integrates with IE6 & 7 to provide seamless HTTP and HTTPS monitoring without leaving the actual browser window.

Some of the uses of HTTP watch that I have come across over time are:

  • Testing a web application to ensure that it is correctly issuing cookies or setting headers that control page expiration
  • Finding out how other sites work and how they implement certain features
  • Checking the information that Internet Explorer is supplying when you visit a site
  • Verifying that a secure web site is not issuing sensitive data in cookies or headers
  • Tuning the performance of a web site by measuring download times, caching or the number of network round trips
  • Learning about how HTTP works
  • Allowing webmasters to fine tune the caching of images and other content
  • Performing regression testing on production servers to verify performance and correct behavior

You can learn more information regarding HTTPwatch @ http://www.httpwatch.com/ and you can view a screenshot of it and it’s integration into IE here: Picture

There Are 2 Responses So Far. »

  1. Gravatar

    Comment by JFR FRANCE Windows Vista Internet Explorer 7.0 on 24 October 2007:

    Hi,

    You can also use DebugBar (http://www.debugbar.com) which gives HTTP requests, grouped by page, as well as a DOM inspector, a Javascript inspector, and much more.
    This is free for personal use.

    For people using javascript, there is also Companion.JS (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/CompanionJS/HomePage) which give js detailled error under IE and add “console.log” feature to IE, like the firebug feature.

    Hope this helps.

    Regards.

    JFR
    http://www.debugbar.com

  2. Gravatar

    Comment by Ivan Pepelnjak SLOVENIA Windows XP Internet Explorer 7.0 on 24 October 2007:

    I really like Fiddler. On top of everything else, you can modify the requests on the fly.

    http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
    http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250446.aspx

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