By juerg on

Hi,

I am having problems to access a drupal site with Internet Explorer (IE). The site is for a closed workgroup and therefore access is via ssl (https). Authentication via webserver and the module webserver_auth. With Firefox, everything works just fine.

With IE, every now and then I am immediately getting an error message "Server or DNS not found" when I want to post a new node or when I hit /admin or /admin/logs (actually it can happen anywhere). When I then hit the "refresh" button in IE, the page gets loaded again without problems. The error message turns up immediately - i.e. it is not a time out.

And again, with Firefox, there are no problems. However all our users are on IE...

All help is much appreciated!

Jürg

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x

Comments

juerg’s picture

juerg commented

I was playing around trying to find out a pattern to the above mentioned behavior: If I press a button every 2 or 3 seconds, everything works fine. However, after waiting say 20 to 30 seconds before pressing e.g. the "submit" button, the chances of getting the "server or DNS not found error" is much higher.
It looks as if IE was forgetting the IP of the server and for some reason not trying to look it up. It happens very fast. Then press "refresh" and the connection is working again. Sometimes you have to press "refresh" even twice. This can be very annoying, when you have entered new content and get this error when you press the submit button! And the more time you need to key in the content, the higher the chance of getting the error!

Is there a setting in IE how long the IP of a webserver is stored? Is this setting different when ssl is active? I don't have this problem when accessing other Drupal sites on http instead of https. Nor do I have the problem when accessing other sites via https (and with Firefox there is no problem at all).

Thank you in advance for any hints

Juerg

dschwarz’s picture

dschwarz commented

Juerg-

I have been researching a very similar problem in a completely unrelated application (internal corporate app). The problem symptoms are identical to what you describe.

IE 4/5/6 have a bug handling HTTPS keepalives.

Documentation of the problem, and the solution (for Apache and IBM Websphere webserver), are available at this website

http://www.modssl.org/docs/2.8/ssl_faq.html#ToC49

Try it and post your results.

Dan

juerg’s picture

juerg commented

Dan,

thank you so much for the link. You gave me new hope! I have now set both the "SetEnvIf" directive and the "SSLSessionCache" directive according to the recommendations at the website you mentioned.

Unfortunately, it did not solve the problem. It is still the same.

Juerg

jjahde’s picture

jjahde commented

I'm having the same problem on my company's intranet that I set up.

-Joe Jahde

jlab’s picture

jlab commented

I had exactly the same problem.

I disabled my cache in the performance settings page. And it seems that everything is working fine now.

.