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A minor update to the Apache httpd project on CentOS 6 had an unexpected consequence. The update from 2.2.15-59 to 2.2.15-60, as advised because of a small security issue, started respecting RFC 1123 and as a result, stops allowing underscores in hostnames.

I spent a while debugging a similar problem with IE dropping cookies on hostnames with underscores, because it turns out that’s not a valid “hostname” as per the definition in RFC 1123.

Long story short, the minor update to Apache broke these kind of URLs;

These worked fine before, but now started throwing these errors;

Bad Request Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Additionally, a 400 Bad Request error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

The error logs showed the message as such;

[error] client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2616 section 14.23)

The short-term workaround was to downgrade Apache again.

$ yum downgrade httpd-tools httpd mod_ssl

And that allowed the underscores again, long-term plan is to migrate those (sub)domains to versions without underscores.