166229 - clicking gets "document contained no data" but pasting link works

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Joshua Goldberg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827

In the given url, clicking on a link such as "Audio Cassette Player" gives a
dialog that says "Document contained no data."  The link is correct, however. 
It loads fine on Netscape 4.7 and, most surprisingly, it works if you Copy link
location and paste it directly into the url field for the browser.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to the given url
2.click a link for one of the equipment explanations
[ Doesn't work.  Brings up dialog. ]
3.For the same link, copy link location, paste url and hit return to load.
[ Works this way. ]

Actual Results:  
dialog

Expected Results:  
loading the page successfully

Comment 1

[John Levon]

the link is at frame :
http://cta.iss.indiana.edu/FMPro?-DB=devices&-Lay=documentation&-Format=documentation/roomtoc.html&room=GY126&includeindoc=y&-Op=neq&printonly=y&-SortField=docrelation::device_empty&-SortOrder=descend&-SortField=platform&-SortOrder=descend&-SortField=nondevicesection&-SortOrder=ascend&-Find


and I can reproduce Joshua's description with current Linux cvs. I guess
the issue here is relative vs. absolute addresses somehow ?

Comment 2

[Kenneth Herron]

I can reproduce this using nightly 2002110822 on solaris 8/sparc. I believe it's
a problem with the website though (specifically the software generating these
pages). 

The given URL displays a list of classrooms. I clicked on "Ballantine 013" and
was presented a list of media resources. Clicking on any of the resources gave
me "Document contained no data".

I started snoop (aka tcpdump) and performed the same test while capturing
packets. According to snoop, the web server is resetting the connection
immediately after receiving mozilla's query and without sending any kind of
response.

I Went into Edit->Prefs->Advanced->HTTP Networking, disabled some features, and
tried again. After turning off "Enable Keep-Alive", I was able to load invidual
media resource links without problems. Switching keepalives on and off reliably
makes the problem reappear of disappear.

I can run "telnet cta.iss.indiana.edu 80", cut & paste the text of the query
(with or without keepalives) into the telnet session, and get a valid page back.
 So I'm not sure what the web server's exact problem is. My leading theory--and
I realize this is lame--is that the web server can't handle data packets larger
than a certain size. Mozilla is sending the entire query in one tcp packet, and
the keep-alive version is 21 bytes longer than the connection:close version.
When I send the query through telnet, the query is split over two tcp frames.
This theory supports the original reporter; when he pastes the URL into the URL
bar, the query would be sent without a referrer, and so would be much shorter.

In any event, this appears to be a problem with the remote web server.

Comment 3

[Kenneth Herron]

Nobody else has commented. Resolving per comment #2.