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

[Shawn Wells]

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

What *specific* OS and browser versions are you attempting to connect 
with?  I'm on RHLE5u1, Firefox 1.5.0.12, and everything works.

-- 
Shawn D. Wells
Solutions Architect, Federal Team
swells at redhat.com
Cell: 443-534-0130
Office: 703-748-2250