Strange problem with forms. browser does not send syn

Question

We are having a strange problem and I hope someone can help (im
stumped).
setup
I have a webserver (iplanet 4.1 sp8) running in secure mode. It has a
weblogic nsapi plugin and forwards EVERYTHING over to an app server.
The app server runs weblogic 4.5 sp10 and hosts both servlets and
static html for an application we are developing.
customers load a long form and are given the ability to upload several
files, but upon pressing the submit button on the form (they must do
each file individually) we get an error message that the page cannot
be displayed.
upon investigation, I look at a tcp trace and find that when the
submit button is pressed, the browser sends an ack packet to the
netscape server and it responds (correctly IMO) with a rst flag.
Why doesn't the browser start communication with a syn/syn-ack/ack
sequence? The form appears to have been completely loaded.
To aggravate matters more, this problem does not always occur and
clearing the browser's cache seems to aggravate it.
I would appreciate ANY help that could be offered.
sorry for the long post,
-Chris
Chris Regenye
Supervisor Systems Services
PR Newswire
[email protected]

Answer 1

In article <[email protected]>,
Chris Regenye <[email protected]> wrote:
Barry Margolin <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:<vzdh7.8$5%1.649@burlma1-snr2>...
In article <[email protected]>,
Chris Regenye <[email protected]> wrote:
We are having a strange problem and I hope someone can help (im
stumped).
setup
I have a webserver (iplanet 4.1 sp8) running in secure mode. It has a
weblogic nsapi plugin and forwards EVERYTHING over to an app server.
The app server runs weblogic 4.5 sp10 and hosts both servlets and
static html for an application we are developing.
customers load a long form and are given the ability to upload several
files, but upon pressing the submit button on the form (they must do
each file individually) we get an error message that the page cannot
be displayed.
upon investigation, I look at a tcp trace and find that when the
submit button is pressed, the browser sends an ack packet to the
netscape server and it responds (correctly IMO) with a rst flag.
Why doesn't the browser start communication with a syn/syn-ack/ack
sequence? The form appears to have been completely loaded.It may be trying to reuse a persistent connection, as recommended in
HTTP/1.1.Great, but the server obviously doesn't believe this is the case. Any
idea how to correct this situation? also... as I mentioned this
problem is intermittant(sp?). When it does not occur, tcp
communications are normal.It sounds like the bug is in the browser. When it gets the RST, it should
realize that the old connection has been dropped (even if a server
implements persistent connections, like it should, it's allowed to close
idle connections after a timeout or if it's running out of resources).
When that happens it should automatically retry on a new connection.
This might explain why the problem is intermittent. The browser is happy
when the connection has remained open, but it doesn't handle the occasional
cases where the server has closed the connection unexpectedly.
Barry Margolin, [email protected]
Genuity, Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.