vURL Online: Bug fixes and problems

Oh the joys ..... you spend ages writing code, functions for that code, testing, re-testing, re-writing, re-testing again - and all goes perfectly. Then out of the blue, problems that weren't there before, suddenly start appearing as if out of nowhere.

This is what seems to have happened lately to the vURL Online service - several issues have arisen that weren't there previously (or if they were, they didn't show up during testing).

I've now fixed the following issues, and would appreciate your pointing me to anymore that you notice;

1. PhishTank returns Bad Request instead of result

This one seems to be sporadic, and I know the cause for this - PhishTank wants the URL not only Base64 encoded, but also URL encoded in cases where the URL contains an "=" - which is fair enough. However, sometimes it is returning a Bad Request error even when the URL is properly formatted.

I think I've fixed this (have tested since, and not noticed it re-appearing), but let me know if you notice the PT results saying Bad Request, instead of Listed or Not Listed.

2. hpHosts announcing a host was listed, when infact it was actually only listed with the www. prefix

This was actually a pretty easy fix as it wasn't a problem with vURL itself, but with the fuzzy matching I was having the hpHosts query perform. I've disabled fuzzy and partial matching, so it will only return true if the domain itself is listed, and not if the domain is listed but ONLY with the "www." prefix.

3. Headers and body not properly split from each other

Again, this is due to the functions I had it perform. I've re-written the function so it now properly splits the headers from the actual source code (this is actually having to be done because I can't seem to find a method to have cURL enclose the headers in "[HEADERS]", seperate from the body as the proxy script returns both in the same result (I could have it perform two requests so they're obtained seperately, but I'm trying to have as little overhead as possible to speed things up).

4. Links not properly detected and returned

The function I wrote for this was actually working perfectly, what was actually happening is that these results were not then being passed back to the main processor for formatting and display. I've no idea what has caused this, and have spent over 3-4 hours scouring the code, but have had to write a work-around instead.

5. User Agent selection

This was not actually a bug, just missing UA's in the UA dropdown list. I've now added a few more to it, namely, MAC (Safari) UA's.

Check out vURL Online at:

http://vurl.mysteryfcm.co.uk/

vURL currently uses an MDB to store the URL's and such being requested, due to the size of the current DB, this is going to be changed to MySQL in the coming months (or when I get around to it - MySQL isn't currently installed on the vURL server, so I'll have to do that, then configure it, then re-write the vURL site to use MySQL instead of MDB).