[Novalug] Arlington County Public Schools website: Windows only? (2nd attempt)

[Craig Pennington]

My daughter is an incoming kindergardener in the Arlington County
Public Schools which inspired my wife to want to research various
topics on the school system's website
(<http://www.apsva.us/aps/site/default.asp> or
<http://arlington.k12.va.us/aps/site/default.asp>) a few months ago.
She couldn't get there from her old iMac using firefox -- it just
hung. I tried my iBook w/Safari and the again w/internet explorer.
Same thing. Then on linux w/firefox, opera and a few others, with &
without User-Agent spoofing. No luck.

Then I fire up the trusty VMware instance of XP I have for when I
absolutely must do something on Windows. The site works fine in
firefox and ie. I fire off a note to the webmaster letting them know
their site is borked and get a response that they're aware of it and
working on it etc. OK, I forget for a few months.

But I tried again last week and it still wasn't fixed. So I fire up
the VMWare instance again and set up tcpflow on the host to record the
traffic between XP and the server. I then replay the initial request
generated by firefox on XP from a simple perl Socket client. Hangs
after 8 bytes. To repeat, I make exactly the same request
(byte-for-byte -- I double checked with tcpflow again) and get
different results. So it looks to me like it is at a lower level than
HTTP that things are broken.

Does anyone recognize these symptoms?

Does this site work for anyone on a non-MS operating system?

Does anyone have any ideas on how to diagnose this?

Attached is the 1st request & 1st response for both the Firefox/XP
session and the Perl/linux session as captured by tcpflow.
(NB: I've omitted the XP response since it is too large for the list.)

Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
  Craig P

-- 
Corollary to Clarke's Third Law:
    Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently
    advanced.
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GET /aps/site/default.asp HTTP/1.1
Host: arlington.k12.va.us
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: aps=AA=False&UA=Guest&AN=&AG=&Q=CF83CBC7&TC=22207&CA=CF83CBC7&II=&TU=CF83CBC7&FN=Guest&ILO=False&SSL=False&NB=False&F=CE83CBC6&SA=False&EA=
Cache-Control: max-age=0

-------------- next part --------------
GET /aps/site/default.asp HTTP/1.1
Host: arlington.k12.va.us
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: aps=AA=False&UA=Guest&AN=&AG=&Q=CF83CBC7&TC=22207&CA=CF83CBC7&II=&TU=CF83CBC7&FN=Guest&ILO=False&SSL=False&NB=False&F=CE83CBC6&SA=False&EA=
Cache-Control: max-age=0

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