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

[Nino Pereira]

Craig,

on another site that only works with Microsoft Internet Explorer,
I got most of what's needed by adding something called PrefBar
in firefox. This gives you the option of emulating browsers
that may work better with those web sites. It's at

prefbar.mozdev.org.

I always protest whenever firefox or Opera has a problem on a Government
web site that only works well with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
It never helps.

Nino


Craig Pennington wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> plate379
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Novalug mailing list
> Novalug at calypso.tux.org
> http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug