Making HTTP requests via telnet

By | July 31, 2011
$ telnet www.spectrumcs.net 80
Trying 208.97.136.171...
Connected to www.spectrumcs.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.spectrumcs.net

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:10:02 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_throttle/3.1.2 DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
MS-Author-Via: DAV
Last-Modified: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:10:28 GMT
ETag: "19cf7aa-68d-4694e4d4"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1677
Content-Type: text/html

The command above was simple. “GET / HTTP/1.1” followed by “Host: www.spectrumcs.net” (required for httpd servers hosting multiple site) followed by 2 line feeds.