Getting a 500 Error When Trying to Access a REST API from C#?

This just might be the solution.

Here's the deal...  I need to write a simple C# client to access data from a REST API served up by an Apache Tomcat server.  Not a big deal at all...  should be pretty simple...

Should be...

For some unknown reason, my attempts generated nothing but '500' errors from the server.  Myself and our resident network wizard captured my traffic and we compared the headers of a successful GET using CURL and the non-successful attempt using my simple C# program.

After trying a few things with no success, I noticed the CURL capture showed an 'Accept: */*' header.  My C# program did not.  So, I added this...

request.Accept = "*/*";

SHAZAM!!!  No more 500 errors.

No search results from Google helped.  None mentioned this as being a possibility.  But, heck...  it worked.

By the way, this Apache server is what I like to call LegalWalled.  Yes, it's our server but if we touch it, or even log onto it using SSH without the guidance and approval of the vendor's support group, we could violate our support contract...  so opportunity to dig into why that specific error was generated.