500 Internal Server error when using curl on an aspx page with SSL

Question

I'm trying to access an aspx webpage using curl but it returns 500 internal server error. It doesn't require any credentials or POST variables I know of, but I think I'm missing something, because when I try to access it from my browser, it does work. The page is just a form with two fields to be filled and POSTed.

curl -L https://my.website.com

Do I need to make any changes to my curl script?

ps. I don't have access to the server or the server's logs

Answer 1

Some things to try and ideas:

1. trace your manual access with e.g. Fiddler or httpfox or firebug. You might see something more elaborate than you have see already (like a 301/302 response, I assume that you added -L to handle such a possibility?
2. as it works when you check out the page via a browser, the page might attempt a referrer check and fail miserably because there is no referrer (hence the 500, a server-side error). The dump you created in 1. will show you what to insert with curl's -e option.