Do HTTP RANGE headers work with Azure Blob Storage Shared Access Signatures?

Question

I'm using Azure Blob Storage to store media files and providing access to these files using Shared Access Signatures; everything is working well in this regard.

However, I have a client application that needs to "resume" access to these files and does so using an HTTP RANGE header. When it makes a request like this, it is unhappy with the result it gets back from Azure.

I'm not sure how to view the details on the Azure side to see if the request failed, or if it just returned something the client didn't expect, and I have no debugging visibility into the client.

Here's what the incoming range header looks like:

RANGE: bytes=4258672-

From the Azure documentation I've read it appears to support RANGE headers, however I'm wondering if there is a conflict using RANGE and Shared Access Signatures together?

Update: It appears that Azure may be returning an incorrect status code for RANGE requests, which is causing my client apps to reject the response. The documentation states that Azure will respond with an HTTP status code of 206 when responding to a RANGE request, however when I issue a RANGE request like this:

curl -I -H "User-Agent: Bonos" -r 500- "https://murfie.blob.core.windows.net/168464/1.mp3?st=2013-07-03T16%3A34%3A32.4832235Z&se=2013-07-03T17%3A34%3A32.4613735Z&sr=b&sp=r&sig=mJgQGW%2Fr3v8HN2%2BVV3Uady7J68nFqeHyzQb37HAhfuE%3D"

Azure returns the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 19988911
Content-Type: application/octet-stream Charset=UTF-8
Last-Modified: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:44:50 GMT
ETag: 0x8D031B57670B986
Server: Blob Service Version 1.0 Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
x-ms-request-id: 77312761-65a9-42ef-90cd-ff718a80b231
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:41:01 GMT

Answer 1

We got this straightened out.

As @BrentDaCodeMonkey mentioned, Azure returns the expected 206 response if you're using API version 2011-01-18 or better, but in our case we don't originate the request so we can't specify this using the request header.

However, some Microsoft friends tipped us of to the fact that you can set the API version globally for a storage account, but you need to use the REST API to do so (it's not something you can do in the management UI). This post explains how:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh452235.aspx

After setting the DefaultServiceVersion to 2011-01-18, we're now getting back the expected 206 status for RANGE requests.

Answer 2

For those who are struggling with the Azure Service API and the tricky Authorization, I recommend the this very simple C# snippet that does exactly the same in a very simpler way (at least for me).

        var credentials = new Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Auth.StorageCredentials("storagename", "storagekey");
        var account = new Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.CloudStorageAccount(credentials, true);
        var client = account.CreateCloudBlobClient();
        var properties = client.GetServiceProperties();
        properties.DefaultServiceVersion = "2013-08-15";
        client.SetServiceProperties(properties);

You'll need to add a nuget package WindowsAzure.Storage v9.3.3 (obsolete, but still works)