Niklas B.'s questions

I set up Apache with mod_wsgi in a default installation, with a very simple test application test.wsgi that goes like this:

def application(environ, start_response):
    status = '200 OK'
    output = 'Path: %s' % environ['PATH_INFO']
    response_headers = [('Content-type', 'text/plain'),
                        ('Content-Length', str(len(output)))]
    start_response(status, response_headers)
    return [output]

Apache itself is basically configured like that:

WSGIScriptAlias / /home/user/wsgi_test/test.wsgi

Now if I access URLs on that server, I get the following output:

• GET /test/../test/./test => Path: /test/test
• GET /test/%2E%2E/abc => Path: /abc
• GET /test%2fabc => 404 Not found (due to AllowEncodedSlashes off, I suppose)

Thus it looks to me that Apache resolves/pre-processes these URLs before passing them to the application, which is nice because it can prevent a lot of local file inclusion and directory traversal attacks where the file path is not part of the query string.

Can one rely on this behaviour or is there some nasty way to trick Apache into actually passing a URL like /test/foo/../bar to the application? Would it be an Apache bug if that was possible?

I am slightly going mad. Even if I call socat like this:

socat -vvvv tcp4-listen:9000 tcp4-listen:9001

it works perfectly, but doesn't inform me about incoming TCP connections! Is there an additional verbosity option that makes socat show this information, something like

Connection from XYZ

Can't be such a special function, or can it?