Getting inconvenience Request only on Gingerbread phones and simulator

Question

Getting inconvenience Request only on Gingerbread phones and simulator

I got a strange problem. I have code that makes a call on the server. The code works fine when I use the Kitkat emulator. However, the same code does not work on Gingerbread phones or the emulator. I always get 400 Bad Request from the server. I checked on the server. Error:

the client sent an HTTP / 1.1 request without a host name (see RFC2616 section 14.23):

Apache is not configured as a virtual host.

here is the code i use:

public void makeServerCall (String serverUrl, String postString) {URL url = new URL (serverURL + ESS_AUTHENTICATE_URL);

        connection =  (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
        connection.setDoOutput(true); 
        connection.setDoInput(true);
        connection.setRequestMethod(HTTP_POST);

        //forcing user agent to a well known user agent with a hope it will work :-)
        connection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:1.3.1)");

        String base64Tenant = "Basic " + Base64.encodeToString( auth.getBytes(), Base64.DEFAULT);
        connection.setRequestProperty(AUTHENTICATE_HEADER, base64Tenant);

        connection.addRequestProperty("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
        connection.addRequestProperty("Pragma", "no-cache");
        connection.setUseCaches(false);



        connection.setRequestProperty( "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
        connection.setRequestProperty("Accept-Charset", "UTF-8");

        System.setProperty("http.keepAlive", "false");

        connection.setFixedLengthStreamingMode(postString.getBytes().length);

        // Send request

        PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(connection.getOutputStream());
        out.print(postString);
        out.close();

        int respCode = connection.getResponseCode();
        Log.i(TAG, "Response code = " + respCode);
        if (respCode != 200) {

            is = connection.getErrorStream();
            if (is != null) {
                String response = getStringFromStream(is);
                Log.d(TAG, "Error occured: " + response);
                is.close();
            }
        }
        else {
        // process success Response
        }
}