Junk file downloaded when port number and connection scheme is mismatched

Question

Hello All,
I am facing a peculiar issue in my server running Apache Tomcat/5.5.9.
I have a Tomcat server setup with 8080 and 8443 ports listening for http and https connections.
When I access the tomcat welcome page hosted in my server as below,
http://<servername>:8080 OR https://<servername>:8443
I get the expected web page. But when I change the scheme and port number,
as below,
http://<servername>:8443
This is what happens,
In IE:
Displays junk characters (in precise, 4 boxes)
In Mozilla/Safari(Mac):
Downloads a junk file which says that it is of type "application/octet-stream"
To shed some more light on the issue,
When I changed the secure server port to 443 and i tried accessing URL,
http://<servername>:443 it took me to the default tomcat welcome page and for any other port other than 443, it gave me the same behavior.
Please let me know if there is any solution for this above scenario and your comments on what is causing this behavior.
Thanks in Advance,
Uday

Answer 1

Hello All,
I found the reason for the problem,
1. No. By spec, SSL negotiation is the very first thing that happens on a SSL connection occurring; there's no way to determine that a non-SSL Connection is being attempted.
2. when we are asking for regular HTTP over a HTTPS port. You'll see the first few bytes of the negotiation, then the protocol will stop.
3. Accessing an HTTPS Connector via an http:// URL (or vice versa) won't work. It's as simple as that. Of course there's a solution for the strange behavior you see when you access an HTTPS Connector via http://:
So unless we fix the secure/insecure port numbers to 443/80 respectively, which we do not want to do, I believe that we would not be able to solve this issue.