getting Banner with cURL

[tz8]

Hi fellow sysops,

i successfully set up the whole system and i do get my banners when i hit my url http://my.servername.de/adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=5623333122773&n=a83aca87 in multiple crowsers (IE, Edge, Chrome, Safari)

but when i hit the very same URL with cURL to save the banner to a file i only get the 1x1 gif in return.

i tried
curl -L "http://my.servername.de/adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=5623333122773&n=a83aca87"
curl -j -L "http://my.servername.de/adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=5623333122773&n=a83aca87"
curl -L --data-urlencoded "zoneid=1&cb=5623333122773&n=a83aca87" http://my.servername.de/adserver/www/delivery/avw.php

and checking with
curl -v "http://my.servername.de/adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=5623333122773&n=a83aca87"
shows that i don't get the desired HTTP/302 with the new Location back but just the 1x1.gif

My guess is it bubbles down to this part of avw.php:

if ($row['default_banner_image_url'] != '') {
MAX_redirect($row['default_banner_image_url']);
} else {
MAX_commonDisplay1x1();
}

so the question is: Why is it working in browsers but fails in cURL? Any hint?

[tz8]

further information:

here's the access.log when called from my browser:

x.x.x.x - - [29/Apr/2016:18:20:11 +0200] "GET /adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=5623333122773&n=a83aca87 HTTP/1.1" 302 1074 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2716.0 Safari/537.36"
x.x.x.x - - [29/Apr/2016:18:20:11 +0200] "GET /adserver/www/images/c8e870699b1cef591f057ecdb846ada6.jpg HTTP/1.1" 304 182 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2716.0 Safari/537.36"

and here's wget:

x.x.x.x - - [29/Apr/2016:18:21:31 +0200] "GET /adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=5623333122773&n=a83aca87 HTTP/1.1" 200 598 "-" "Wget/1.16 (linux-gnu)"

and here's cURL:

x.x.x.x - - [29/Apr/2016:18:30:51 +0200] "GET /adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=562356712521&n=a83aca86 HTTP/1.1" 200 542 "-" "curl/7.38.0"

and here's a more verbose output of curl:

user@host:~$ curl -vvv -L -c cookiejar "http://my.servername.de/adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=562356712521&n=a83aca86"
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
*   Trying x.x.x.x...
* Connected to my.servername.de (x.x.x.x) port 80 (#0)
> GET /adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=1&cb=562356712521&n=a83aca86 HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.38.0
> Host: my.servername.de
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 16:43:02 GMT
* Server Apache/2.4.10 (Debian) is not blacklisted
< Server: Apache/2.4.10 (Debian)
< Pragma: no-cache
< Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
< Expires: 0
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
* Added cookie OAID="f47bb8e275b37437fcb91658e928b342" for domain my.servername.de, path /, expire 1493484182
< Set-Cookie: OAID=f47bb8e275b37437fcb91658e928b342; expires=Sat, 29-Apr-2017 16:43:02 GMT; Max-Age=31536000; path=/
* Added cookie OAVARS[a83aca86]="a%3A2%3A%7Bs%3A8%3A%22bannerid%22%3Bs%3A0%3A%22%22%3Bs%3A6%3A%22zoneid%22%3Bs%3A1%3A%221%22%3B%7D" for domain my.servername.de, path /, expire 0
< Set-Cookie: OAVARS[a83aca86]=a%3A2%3A%7Bs%3A8%3A%22bannerid%22%3Bs%3A0%3A%22%22%3Bs%3A6%3A%22zoneid%22%3Bs%3A1%3A%221%22%3B%7D; path=/
< Content-Length: 43
< Content-Type: image/gif
< 
* Connection #0 to host my.servername.de left intact
GIF89a����!�,D;

 

both wget and curl receive the 1x1.gif (see last line of the output above), just the browser actually gets the intended banner

anyone?

[tz8]

just in case anyone needs this in the future - this doesn't seem to be a common problem around here based on the sheer amount of responses:

    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookieJar);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookieJar);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, APP_URL.'/fancy_changing_fake_url_here/page/');

i managed to successfully get banners when i pass curl a cookiejar for the entire session and an always changing referrer

[Erik Geurts]

I wouldn't call this 'a common problem' at all, this is actually a complete edge case, in the more than 12 years I've been around in this, I've never seen anyone trying to do this.

[tz8]

as i found out the hard way ;)

but i'm also using revive in a very edge case environment, so everything here is out of your standard usecase