Why do I receive different HTTP response codes when accessing Facebook XML feeds from different servers?

Question

Hi all

I'm using the Zend Framework, specifically the Zend_Feed class, to grab the Facebook XML feed at http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=120635284755 and merge it with a similar Twitter feed for display on a website.

The problem is that while I can grab the feed absolutely fine from both my local and remote testing servers, when I launch the app live at [http://www.pycsam.com.au], it is receiving a 403 response code.

Until I work out what is going wrong, I am mirroring the Facebook feed through my testing server, which proves that it works just fine, but it's not a good long-term solution since it requires an extra request.

Is anybody able to tell me why I would be receiving a different response from the Facebook server when the request is coming from different servers?

Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

403 means "Forbidden". This can have any number of reasons:

• You need to authenticate at some point, and the authentication doesn't work

• The IP you are making the request from is blocked by Facebook's servers for some reason

• There is a proxy somewhere in between blocking access (rather unlikely I'd say)

you may be able to get more detailed info by checking what the request body has to say.