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By wdmartin on
Yesterday I went to a client's site to demo a theme I'd made for them based on a design they provided. When we were looking at it, we encountered "Bad Request" or "Forbidden" errors every time we submitted a form through the site. Some of the forms worked, but many did not. For example, logging in would generate a "Bad Request" error, but then you actually would be logged in and could proceed. Similarly, you could create new content without problems. But any time we tried to change settings in the admin section, we'd get either "Bad Request" or "Forbidden" and the changes would not be made. I've never seen anything quite like it, but it rendered the site more or less unusable. There were no errors in the Drupal logs related to the errors, and I haven't got access to the server logs to check them (yet -- the sysadmin is in Hawaii on vacation for the next week).
It was also profoundly embarrassing. Why is it that the worst screwups ALWAYS happen during demos?
I've been unable to reproduce the problem anywhere else. I've since tried it with IE, Safari, Firefox, and Opera on three different computers and had no problems. I suspect that the copy of Firefox we were using at the client's site is somehow screwed up. It was Firefox 3.x running on Mac OS X 10.5, though I've had flawless results with an identical setup at another location, so it's got to be something to do with how that copy of Firefox 3.x was configured.
Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this? My client will need to fix the browsers at their site, and so far I haven't been able to identify the exact cause. I suspect reinstalling Firefox might help, but I won't know for sure until I can sit down at the client site again and try it. It would be helpful to have a clearer idea what's going on.
