Connection testing via Basic Authorization not working (was: Not using method "HEAD" for connection testing)

[Marcus Mülbüsch]

Hello list,

   I want to check a remote host which uses Authorization for access. 
However, monit always gets an 401 response.

   I changed my configuration to port 80 so I can tcpdump the traffic. 
I changed username and password to wiki:pedia, because the German 
Wikipedia uses this pair to demonstrate base64 encoding.

   My config thus is:

> check host PBX-Alarms with address 11.22.33.44
>         if failed
>                 port 80
>                 protocol http
>                 request "/LOG0/FAULT/mod_cmd.xml?cmd=xml-alarms"
>                 use http headers [Authorization: "Basic d2lraTpwZWRpYQ=="] # 
> "wiki:pedia"
>         then alert

   When using links as browser from the same machine I see the request

> GET /LOG0/FAULT/mod_cmd.xml?cmd=xml-alarms HTTP/1.1
...
> User-Agent: Links (2.8; Linux 3.10.40-vs2.3.6.8 x86_64; GNU C 4.6.4; text)
...
> Authorization: Basic d2lraTpwZWRpYQ==

   and the server responds with:

> HTTP/1.1 200 OK

   Using monit, the request is:

> GET /LOG0/FAULT/mod_cmd.xml?cmd=xml-alarms HTTP/1.1
...
> User-Agent: Monit/5.17.1
> Authorization:Basic d2lraTpwZWRpYQ==

   and the response is:

> HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

   I'm not quite sure whether the missing space between 
"Authorization:" and "Basic" is mandated by RFC 2616, but that seems to 
be the only functional difference.

   Is this a monit bug? Or a server bug? Or is my configuration wrong?

   Thank you,

Marcus