weird 403 (forbidden) website access issue

[Mike Clarke]

On Wednesday, 1 April 2020 06:03:05 BST Gary Aitken wrote:

> How likely is it that the small window size (1028) in the 4th pair (HTTP:
> GET request) is causing the server to refuse the request?
> If so, is this a firefox issue or an underlying tcp issue?

It's not just Firefox. I've tried Firefox, Chrome, Midori and Konqueror and get the 403 code with 
them all from my FreeBSD box but no problem with Firefox, Chrome and Edge on Windows 10.

But I think I've found a clue to the cause. I tried Lynx with its default settings and it worked fine 
but when I changed the user agent header to Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:74.0) Gecko/
20100101 Firefox/74.0 I got a 403 error.

Looks like the server is only accepting requests from a restricted range of browser and OS 
combinations

Lynx/2.8.9rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1d-freebsd
is accepted but
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:74.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/74.0
appears to be regarded as 'dangerous'.

-- 
Mike Clarke