Am I seeing a problem or just connecting unconnected dots?

Mountainman · Post by **Mountainman** » January 14th, 2004, 12:43 pm

Looking through this forum and the Miscellaneous forum it appears thast there are a lot of cases of people having problems accessing various web sites that work fine for other people. I admit that this is of interest to me because of a similar problem I am having (see my post in the Miscellaneous forum.) One post in this forum even mentions being able to access the site on one machine but not on another. I've tried everything I can think of: upgrading, new profile, fiddling with configuration etc. and still no joy. So back to the subject. Am I seeing a problem or am I just grasping at straws?

One suggestion...the page I am having trouble with is clearly a redirection page, but I never see that page, just a blank screen (page info lists the address as about:blank). So my suggestion would be to have some configuration setting that would allow the intermediate page to be displayed, so that I could at least have a starting point. I know it's redirecting because firebird resolves and loads something from one URL, and then resolves and tries to load from another URL. Which match the URLs I see when I grab the first page via telnet. But in firebird I *never* see the redirection page.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031216 Firebird/0.7+
Windows XP Pro

Thanks for any help anyone can offer.
My post in the miscellaneous forum: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=45292

ghola · Post by **ghola** » January 14th, 2004, 3:54 pm

The page redirects me to http://customer1.barchart.com/custom/gptc/5990.htm and it works fine for me. Well, that doesn't help, does it? Are you using a proxy or could your ISP/router/modem be using a proxy or filtering without you knowing it?

Mountainman · Post by **Mountainman** » January 15th, 2004, 3:29 pm

I'm not using a proxy that I know of. Firebird isn't configured to use one. I can access the page from the same computer using an old NS6 install (which isn't configured to use a proxy either), so I don't think it's anything my ISP is doing. When I click on the link you show above it loads fine. If I click on the link in my original message it starts to redirect to customer1.barchart.com and then just stalls, and eventually says that it's done, no error dialogs or anything.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » January 17th, 2004, 3:36 pm

I did some sniffing and here's what I came up with:
First a recap...I can access http://sites3.barchart.com/pl/gptc/char ... code=XGPTC from an old NS6 install but not from firebird 0.7 on the exact same machine.
so my sniffing results:

the sites3.barchart.com request redirects to customer1.barchart.com/.../webplt.exe?... (...=extra stuff)
the customer1.barchart.com/.../webplt.exe?... redirects to customer1.barchart.com/.../####.htm (####=four numeric digits)
up to this point but the NS6 trace and trhe firebird trace are functionally the same
when customer1.barchart.com/.../####.htm is requested things get a little interesting
both traces show a series of ACK packets being passed back and forth after the GET
both traces close the connection after 4 rounds of ACKs
but NS6 then goes on to retry the GET and succeds, firebird gives up.

BTW when I enter the customer1.barchart.com/.../webplt.exe?... URL directly into firebird it works fine. Unfortunately it's a form request so generating it by hand would be a real pain.

Another odd thing...when making the request by way of the sites3.barchart.com URL there is a long pause (approx. 2 min) after the customer1.barchart.com/.../####.htm GET. but there is no such delay when using the .../webplt.exe?... URL directly. The delay seems to be server generated though so I doubt there is anything I can do about it.

SO any ideas at this point would be appreciated.

Mountainman · Post by **Mountainman** » January 17th, 2004, 6:56 pm

Okay, I think I figured out the problem. The customer1.barchart.com/.../webplt.exe?... request causes the customer1.barchart.com/.../####.htm file to be generated by the server, appearently by a seperate process. The problem is that that takes time, and before the server process completes firebird gives up. This explains why I can then make a new request for the ####.htm file and it comes right up. It also explains why NS6 works, it makes a second request for the file, by which time the file has been generated and so the request completes.
So now the question becomes, assuming that the above is the problem, how can I work around this with firebird? The best solution I think would be the get firebird to generate a second request like NS6 does. Another solution would be to get firebird to wait longer than 4 ACK exchanges.

So any ideas of how I can get this to work?

BTW the above post is from me.