Meaning of Referrer="-" and user-agent="Java/1.4.1_04"?

[Chris]

What does it mean when my web logs contain a "-" as the referrer and a
user-agent of "Java/1.4.1_04"?

What kind of browser or bot generates a user-agent like that?

I'm getting a very large number of these in the logs.

 

[Benjamin Niemann]

Hello,

What does it mean when my web logs contain a "-" as the referrer and a
user-agent of "Java/1.4.1_04"?

What kind of browser or bot generates a user-agent like that?

I'm getting a very large number of these in the logs.

The user-agent is probably the default value from HTTP client implementation
from the java standard library. Referer "-" simply means 'no referer
information provided'.

So you have someone who implemented a bot in java and didn't care to
overwrite the default user-agent string - unlikely, but not impossible that
this is some kind of 'published software'. For more informations, you'll
have to look at the IP addresses, other HTTP headers, ... and even then you
will not really know for sure, whats happening.

Because someone might be sending these values just to confuse you...


HTH