MSIE download troubles

Martin_Eggen · July 21, 2008, 5:19pm

Hi,
I have a pretty standard nginx reverse proxy set up, nginx 0.6.31
terminates SSL
and forwards requests to application server.

Said application (portal) has some files available for download,
Internet
Explorer fails to load these, for some reason I haven’t figured out.
Explorer gives the error “cannot download file (…) The requested site
is either
unavailable or cannot be found”. However, there are no errors in the
logs, and a
dump shows that Explorer indeed loads the entire file (but fails to open
it
properly).

Other browsers work without problems, and Explorer loads and opens the
files
perfectly if requesting them directly from the portal (bypassing the
proxy).

My config contains the following:

sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
gzip off;
client_max_body_size 10m;
client_body_buffer_size 128k;

Any hints how to please IE?

regards,
Martin

Martin_Eggen · July 21, 2008, 5:44pm

Hi

I cannot be sure, but I remember, a long time ago, having to use the
BrowserMatch force-no-vary hack for MSIE.
The error that you are getting from MSIE was exactly the one I used to
see.

Google around for “force-no-vary” and see if the first post makes any
sense to you

It appeared that MSIE choked when the “Vary” header was sent in the HTTP
response.
Of course, I may be completely off track here, but can you check the
following:

Sniff the HTTP packets between your browser and NGINX. See if you are
getting the “Vary” response being sent back to you from NGINX.
Grepping through an older version of nginx (0.5.30), I can see that
NGINX doesn’t do anything special with the Vary header. So possibly,
your app server needs to be told not to send back the vary header for
MSIE browsers

Again, I may be completely off-track, but is your app server Apache ? If
I remember aright, using mod_rewrite caused the Vary header to be sent
back in some cases, and that choked IE

Hope this helps

Regards
Mansoor

----- “Martin Eggen” [email protected] wrote: