I'm confused.....

Hi,

>      I have an NCSA httpd server running on a particular system.  There is 
>      a PC that (using Netscape) can't access that server.  It can gopher 
>      there, telnet there, and even ping there so it can physically get to 
>       ...
>      it.  While watching the logs during an attempt it logs the "GET" 
>      command, but after that nothing.  And the guy on the PC says

If the time of log entry is about 10-15 minutes after the moment the
user requested the page, then you might have run into this problem,
which I had some days ago. It was quite puzzling until I discovered the
reason.

The user reported, that he wanted to access the server, but didn'r get
anything within a few minutes of wait, so he stopped the request. When
watching the log wile chatting with him on the phoine, I noticed, that a
GET was logged about 10-15 minutes after he told me that he started the
request, and thus after he had already stopped again the request.

The reason for this was, that our server has identification enabled.
Thus when the server gets the request it first tries to idenitify the
remote user. Normally this is no problem as it either get's an immediate
response, or gets a "connection refused" when the remote host is not run
an identification daemon.

In this particular case, the user sits behind a firewall, and it
appears, that the firewall filters out the request to connect to the
identification service without sending anything back indicating the the
connections cannot be made. Thus the connect request hangs until it
times out. And this causes the 10-15 minute delay.

				claudio
-- 
Claudio Nieder, APS Applied Systematics AG, Seefeldstr. 231, 8008 Zürich
Mail: claudio.nieder@aps.ch  Phone: +41 1 381 21 22 Fax: +41 1 381 21 27

Received on Friday, 12 April 1996 09:23:20 UTC