298397 - Issues accessing Intranet Site of Windows 2003 due to NTLM session

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Charles Banks]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Accessing Intranet Home Page takes (on average) 20-30 seconds to load.  Parts of
the page do not come up because of access issues.  Network trace file shows
Unauthorized, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE (text/html).
No problems with Internet Explorer.  I have the following set:
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris
network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Launch with Intranet site as home page
2.Go to Companyweb home page
3.

Actual Results:  
Partial access to site; errors on site.

Expected Results:  
Seamless access to Intranet Site, just like IE

Comment 1

[Darin Fisher]

Charles,

Can you please provide more details.  This bug is WORKSFORME and it is also not
a problem for many other people.  We cannot help resolve this issue unless you
provide more details about what is special about your setup.  Perhaps you could
provide us with a live testcase?

Comment 2

[Darin Fisher]

Can you test the latest Firefox 1.1 alpha ("deer park alpha 1"):
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/

Comment 3

[Charles Banks]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Charles,
> 
> Can you please provide more details.  This bug is WORKSFORME and it is also not
> a problem for many other people.  We cannot help resolve this issue unless you
> provide more details about what is special about your setup.  Perhaps you could
> provide us with a live testcase?

I have a Windows 2003 Small Business Server which comes with Share Point and a
Company Web.  The server is current with all updates, service packs and patches.
 There should be nothing special about my setup, or 5 other locations I have
tried this with.  Only detail info I can give you is, that with IE6 the page
comes up in 5 seconds, all information is always displayed and I never have
errors.  With Firefox I always look at 25 to 30 seconds for the page to come up
and usally I don't have all the information.  8 times out of 10 I get errors
when I click on a link.  How would I go about giving you a live test case?  I
have Network Trace files which show the un-authorized errors.

Side Note: When I first setup Firefox with no changes to security, I had to
login everytime.

Comment 4

[Charles Banks]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Can you test the latest Firefox 1.1 alpha ("deer park alpha 1"):
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/

Yes

Comment 5

[Charles Banks]

Attachment: Screen Shots and Network Captures

Comment 6

[James Ross]

I can only see requests for default.aspx and a single JS file (plus all those
lame favicon.ico requests). What happened to the other requests (images)? Could
it be using pipelining? Or did it not actually request them at all?

If you could make a Firefox HTTP log using the instructions on
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/http-debugging.html and attach that,
it may be enlightening as to what is happening.

Side note: the trace shows nothing wrong - the unauthorized messages are a
normal part of using HTTP and NTLM authentication.
 - It tries a normal non-authed HTTP request, and gets an HTTP error (401).
 - Then it tries NTLM, by sending a negotiation.
 - The server then challenges the client (this is normal).
 - Finally, the client sends the challenge reply (auth) which completes the NTLM
procedure and things load.

Comment 7

[Charles Banks]

Attachment: Logfile of startup to homepage

I compared the network capture from IE6 and DPA and saw that both had
Unauthorized, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE.  So if security is not the issue, why does it
take IE6 only 5 ot 10 seconds and Firefox 25 to 30 to display the home page? 
Also, why is the image 'Quick Launch' missing from the left hand side? The
final question, why the errors after the homepage comes up.  I will work with
you on this if you are willing to help me figure this out.

Comment 8

[James Ross]

I'm not sure why it would be that much slower, but I can tell you from the log
that *every* request goes through the request -> unauthorized -> NTLM request ->
challenge -> challenge-reply -> data cycle. It is possible (though I don't know)
that IE is skipping some of those steps somehow (just using the final NTLM key?)
when making requests after the first.

It also seems that all the images are loaded and cached properly. You didn't say
what the image that is missing is called, but if it is home.gif or logo.gif then
the log claims it was loaded fine.

You also don't appear to have explained the errors you get when clicking links.
Could you elaborate on that please? (is it JS errors? loads a webpage with an
error displayed?)

Comment 9

[Charles Banks]

Attachment: No Icons

If you look at the screen shot I sent of the IE6 home page, you wll see "Quick
Launch" on the left border.  I never see that in Firefox.  The attached file
shows  that not all icons are displayed at the time I went to the home page. 
The errors I get are either nothing happens when I click on a link or,
sometimes I get a screen full of the JS script.
I know that you can't use Firefox with some of Microsoft's Web Sites, could
this have something to do with it?

Comment 10

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 11

[Charles Banks]

I do not understand why I keep hitting a brick wall on this subject.  The simple
fact is, Windows 2003 SBS Home Page does not work correctly with Firefox.  I put
alot of time and effort on this issue, but no one will provide a resolution to
this.  Deer Park did not resolve the issue, nor changes in security.  Most
people I have on Firefox use IE6 to access the Company Web Page.  Unfortunately,
if you set the Home Page to always use IE6, you run into another set of problems.

Comment 12

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Confirming.  Darin, does the log file tell you anything here?

Comment 13

[Darin Fisher]

Yes, the slowness observed with Firefox is probably due to the multiple round trips to re-setup the NTLM session on the connections.  Interestingly, only two connections are ever created, which means that it should not be necessary to re-authenticate an already authenticated connection.  I'm really not sure why the server is doing that.  There isn't much of an indication in the log file as to why, which leaves me baffled.  It might be interesting to compare a tcpdump from IE with one from Firefox to see if they are sending different data in their NTLM requests.  You could use a tool like ethereal to capture that data.

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Charles, do you still see this problem?

Comment 15

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

@Reporter, we have not heard back from you in a while, so I am closing this bug as INCOMPLETE. You can reopen this bug if more information becomes available. Some helpful information you can provide us is found at http://quality.mozilla.org/bug-writing-guidelines. You should also use a recent version of Firefox, from http://www.getfirefox.com.