[Catalyst] Content-Length: 0 on POSTs

Bill Moseley moseley at hank.org
Fri Sep 29 23:43:32 CEST 2006


I've had two users now report that posting forms in SSL mode is not
working.  Both times I've dumped the request headers and see that they
are posting with a Content-Length: header of zero.

What happens is they just get the form back again.  That's expected
because my form processing code assumes if there's no content
(specifically, no valid token submitted) then it's not a valid form
and just re-displays the form.


This seems to be a case of this:

    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=831167

Although in both cases it's been at an organization with an IT staff
and the user claims the IT staff keeps their computers up to date.

I'm running Apache 2.0.54 on a front/back setup and catalyst is
running under mod_perl.  The MS article claims this happens when
reposting after the server resets the connection.  I can't see any
reason Apache would be resetting the connection, so that doesn't
really fit with the MS article.

It's an SSL connection, so I'm really only able to look at the request
headers between my front and back servers.  So, I just have to trust
that mod_proxy is not the one stripping the content length.

Anyone else familiar with this problem?  What else could I look at for
debugging this?

Here's the headers as Catalyst sees them:

Cache-Control: no-cache
Via: 1.1 test.hank.org
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-us
Host: 127.0.0.1:10443
Max-Forwards: 10
Referer: https://test.hank.org/login
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cookie: ws2_session=f77489a89b4fbf4912056e4542c42a121a84150c
X-Forwarded-For: 66.122.x.x
X-Forwarded-Host: test.hank.org
X-Forwarded-Server: test.hank.org
==================================================

Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: deflate
Content-Length: 2642
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Response ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The live form is at https://infopeople.org/login



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org




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