8

When I check pages for broken links using Xenu's Link Sleuth it usefully lists information about the web server, OS and PHP version
e.g.

Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8j PHP5.2.9

Is there a simple way to extract similar information from the browser when viewing a page e.g. by a Javascript snippet/bookmarklet?

Update
The server information is part of the HTTP response header which is not accessible to Javascript. So a Javascript/bookmarklet solution would not be directly possible (though it could do something like sending the page URL to a site like Arjan's below).

4 Answers 4

3

The Web Developer toolbar for Firefox has among its many options a way to view page response headers. (Information | View Response Headers)

6
  • Aha! I already have the Web Dev toolbar installed but hadn't noticed that menu item. Thanks.
    – pelms
    Nov 18, 2009 at 17:15
  • Always happy to help.
    – ale
    Nov 18, 2009 at 18:28
  • Good answer, but it won't show the operating system (unless the web server includes that), does it?
    – Arjan
    Nov 18, 2009 at 18:39
  • Probably. It might require some inference. superuser.com returns "Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0" as one of the values. IIS 7 implies Windows Server 2008, does it not?
    – ale
    Nov 18, 2009 at 19:15
  • Well, there's more than one flavour of Windows ;-) And for some installations the response headers just return "Apache" (like for rubyforge.org) or "nginx" (like for gravatar.com). (But I guess the question asker doesn't really care about that; using the Developer Toolbar surely is an easy way to get some information. And neither the response headers nor Netcraft can figger out what twitter.com is using...)
    – Arjan
    Nov 18, 2009 at 20:48
5

curl -I yoursite.com is another simple way to at least see what kind of server it is as well as some other basic header information.

2
  • He asked "from the browser". curl is a command line utility.
    – Catalyst
    Jul 17, 2017 at 14:47
  • 1
    I think this is still relevant information for anyone who views this thread and is looking for something similar. Jul 18, 2017 at 15:27
2

Or from Chrome Dev Tools

Network > All > Headers

Refresh the page then click the site name at the top of the list in the 'Name' panel and look at the Response Headers:
enter image description here Though for security, fewer and fewer sites include this information nowadays.

2

The information you mention seems the same as Netcraft's "What's that site running" provides. Still note that this information is not by definition The Truth; a web server can report anything it likes.

Also, it's just never as complete as the real story.

I didn't know IIS could run on Linux? Ah, Jeff says some parts of SO are Linux, like the load balancer (HAProxy).

2
  • Re: stackoverflow.com. Strange, the header just reports 'Microsoft-IIS/7.0'. I wonder where Netcraft gets the OS from. Is this a virtual machine thing???
    – pelms
    Nov 18, 2009 at 17:26
  • Ah, just seen your other link re. OS detection...
    – pelms
    Nov 18, 2009 at 17:28

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