Not knowing the ins and outs of http, I'm not sure what all of that means. I do know that get works and head doesn't, even with allow_redirects, so I am wondering how we would deal with this in an actual failure situation. What if one of the urls fails with head but not with get? The test would fail continually. This is precisely what I saw when I tried to use head instead of get on mcom-tests. I agree that it is unfortunate that we have to use get, which is much more expensive, but we cannot really have a test in our suite that is constantly failing because of a configuration issue on the other host. At least I don't think we can.