Mongrel users - Jun 2006 - Ajax and IE causing Page Not Found and 500 Errors behind SSL

Hi,

Forgive this if it is a duplicate, because I was having trouble  
posting to the list.

I have a setup of mongrel behind an apache proxy and I am getting a  
few people using IE (5.5 & 6.0) complaining about getting sporadic  
page not found errors when using AJAX features of the site and file  
uploads behind SSL.  I am posting the research I have done on the  
subject.

I have the following in my Apache conf

<IfModule setenvif_module>
BrowserMatch ".*MSIE.*" \
          nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
          downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
</IfModule>

in an effort to make SSL work better with IE, but I am still getting  
the problem.

I am not sure if this is working as I have tried the following:
curl -D header -A "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;  
SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" https://www.server
.com

and I get the following result in the headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 23:35:41 GMT
Server: Mongrel 0.3.12.4
Content-Length: 7363
Status: 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: _session_id=4a000ec09f7b9fd417400ec3d9235492; path=/
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Pad: avoid browser bug

Should I see
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
instead?

Even when I request something that is cached I get the following:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 23:39:56 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 23:39:12 GMT
ETag: "2b1f-709d-dfe82800"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 28829
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html

so it appears that HTTP/1.1 is still in effect, which may be  
problematic.

The site worked fine with lighttpd and fastcgi, and I used the  
following in my lighttpd.conf to get around it:

$HTTP["useragent"] =~ "^(.*MSIE.*)|(.*AppleWebKit.*)$" {
      server.max-keep-alive-requests = 0
}

Does someone know an Apache snippet to disable keepalives for IE when  
it is behind SSL, so hopefully I can make this go away?  I thought  
the above BrowserMatch snippet would work, but I am having mixed  
results with it.

These Apache environment variables may hold the key, but at this  
point I am just guessing:
force-proxy-request-1.0, proxy-nokeepalive, proxy-sendchunked, proxy- 
sendcl

Thanks,
Curtis

On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 16:56 -0700, Curtis Spencer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Forgive this if it is a duplicate, because I was having trouble  
> posting to the list.
> 
> I have a setup of mongrel behind an apache proxy and I am getting a  
> few people using IE (5.5 & 6.0) complaining about getting sporadic  
> page not found errors when using AJAX features of the site and file  
> uploads behind SSL.  I am posting the research I have done on the  
> subject.
> 
Hey Curtis, can you tell me the versions of your operating system,
Apache, Mongrel, and Ruby?  Can''t really go on much without that.

As for HTTP/1.1 -- Mongrel is an HTTP/1.1 only web server.  There should
be no clients that claim to be 1.0 anymore, but Mongrel will accept
requests from them, it just doesn''t do much to support 1.0.  Trying to
support both is really not worth the effort in order to support such a
tiny share of the servers out there.  If you have 1.0 clients that
absolutely can''t be upgraded, then put Mongrel behind apache (like you
are) or Pound and have those proxy servers do the translation.


-- 
Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/
http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/

> Hey Curtis, can you tell me the versions of your operating system,
> Apache, Mongrel, and Ruby?  Can''t really go on much without that.
> 
> As for HTTP/1.1 -- Mongrel is an HTTP/1.1 only web server.  There should
> be no clients that claim to be 1.0 anymore, but Mongrel will accept
> requests from them, it just doesn''t do much to support 1.0. 
Trying to
> support both is really not worth the effort in order to support such a
> tiny share of the servers out there.  If you have 1.0 clients that
> absolutely can''t be upgraded, then put Mongrel behind apache (like
you
> are) or Pound and have those proxy servers do the translation.
Zed,

 Thanks for the quick reply.  After logging the environment
 variables such as nokeepalive, I found that the BrowserMatch statement
 that I had wasn''t working because it was for the _default_:443 virtual
 host the environment variables weren''t being set properly.  So I put
 another

 BrowserMatch ...

 inside the more specific virtual host and I was getting the downgrade
 to 1.0 effect I desired. My curl output now looks like this:

 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
 Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 18:02:40 GMT
 Server: Mongrel 0.3.12.4
 Content-Length: 7176
 Status: 200 OK
 Cache-Control: no-cache
 Content-Type: text/html
 Set-Cookie: _session_id=3952e4e54aa9dc3433dc0c030040a9cf; path=/
 Vary: Accept-Encoding
 Connection: close

 when I simulate the IE user agent.

 Thanks,
 Curtis