220988 - Conn: "connection refused" brings up VPN popup (XP)

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 169841

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Jeremy Tan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030916
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030916

If I give a URL for a server with no server listening on port 80, Mozilla brings
up a connection dialog.  This didn't happen to me until I added a VPN connection
in my Network Connections.  This doesn't occur under other browsers nor if I
just run telnet <blah> 80 so I'm assuming that Mozilla is doing this.

It's extremely annoying as I map a lot of ad sites to 127.0.0.1.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Create a VPN connection under Windows XP
2.Send Mozilla to http://127.0.0.1/ (assuming there is no server running on
localhost)


Actual Results:  
Brings up VPN dialog.

Expected Results:  
Return an error message in the browser saying that it cannot connect to the browser.

Comment 1

[benc]

Does this happen in other browsers?

This might be useful info as well:

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/networking/docs/netprefs.html

Comment 2

[Jeremy Tan]

Hi, sorry I'm away on vacation and getting at my internal email is a pain in the
butt for me.  Anyway, it doesn't happen for IE, which is the only other one I've
tried.

Comment 3

[Darin Fisher]

Jeremy, Mozilla is inspecting your IE preferences to determine if it should try
to establish a network connection when a connection fails.  We obviously should
not be doing this for 127.0.0.1, but that said.. you might want to try editing
your IE preferences.  I believe that under the Connections panel there should be
an option to tell IE whether or not to automatically "dial up" your "ISP" ...
here "dial up" can mean "connect to" and "ISP" can mean your "VPN".  Please have
a look at those prefs since it might help you avoid this problem in the short
term.  Meanwhile, I think we can fix Mozilla to avoid this for 127.0.0.1 :)

Comment 4

[Jeremy Tan]

Hmmmm, interesting.  I wouldn't think Mozilla would be checking IE preferences
but oh well.  Oddly enough, the dialup/VPN panel doesn't show up in IE though.

At any rate, I've changed the IE settings and now it doesn't happen in Mozilla
anymore.

As an aside, I don't think the dialup/VPN popup should be coming up on a
"Connection refused" but I'm not a TCP/IP expert or anything.  Somehow, IE is
able to distinguish between a situation where there are no active network
interfaces and one where it can't connect to a server.

Anyway, thanks for your help.

Comment 5

[Phillip Saltzman]

I can confirm this behavior. When using VPN and a hosts file to redirect ads to
127.0.0.1, every time an image is blocked Mozilla spawns a "Connecting
[connection name]" dialouge. When it spaws, no pages will load until the
connection is made or the dialouge is dismissed. I can also confirm after
reading this bug report that setting the IE prefs never to dial connections is a
perfect workaround for this bug. Still, it would be good to make it ignore this
for 127.0.0.1 and add a preference that mirrors or edits IE's for the general
behavior to the Mozilla preferences.

Comment 6

[Darin Fisher]

punt

Comment 7

[Peter Galovic]

I had no problem with Mozilla until installing version 1.6 or 1.7B. Version 1.6B
is working fine, but above mentined are giving me a "Connection refused"
message. My IE setting is unchanged, showing "never dial connetion".
I am running on VPN (connected to the internet via another PC using XP system).
Now I restored my 1.6B copy, but I cannot install any new version of Mozilla.

Peter

Comment 8

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 169841 ***

Comment 9

[benc]

V/dupe.