Strangest ... bug ... ever?

Anon

I have a very strange problem. I have a PHP script running on my own computer (WinXP w/ Apache 1.3.22). It works fine when accessed from my computer, using any of the possible addresses: 127.0.0.1, my address on our LAN, or my address on the Internet. But when another computer tries to access the script, either through the LAN or through the Internet, a very strange problem rears its ugly head.

I did say any computer, and that includes the W3C Validator. When I try to validate the page, it says it encountered an unexpected error: "500 bad header:" and then it displays a line of the HTML source that the PHP script outputs! The line of HTML that is displayed is NOWHERE near the top of the source. How it could be mistaken for a header is a complete mystery to me.

When viewed through Internet Explorer from another computer, the page reads part of the HTML, then refreshes, then reads part of it again, then refreshes again. Endlessly refreshing.

I Telnet'ed to my computer and requested the URI of the script. The amount of HTML returned before the connection is closed is inconsistent, but there are never any headers. The first line of the response is always "".

It gets weirder, however. If I put in a die(); in the middle of the PHP code, it works. If I take out a section of the HTML, it works. There are any number of tiny things I can remove so it'll work, but as it is, it endlessly refreshes and gives bad header errors.

Also, for the heck of it I uploaded the script to the remote server that I use for my actual website (run by someone who actually knows what he's doing, with Linux/Apache 1.3.24, but I don't see why that should make a difference), and it works fine. From any computer. Aaaack!

ANY and ALL thoughts (no matter how far-fetched) as to why this might be happening will be rewarded with eternal friendship. 😃

Thanks in advance,
Linus

Anon

I thought this forum neutered HTML. The last sentence of this paragraph:

<blockquote>
I Telnet'ed to my computer and requested the URI of the script. The amount of HTML returned before the connection is closed is inconsistent, but there are never any headers. The first line of the response is always "".
</blockquote>

Should read like this:

<blockquote>
The first line of the response is always "<html>".
</blockquote>

brandonschnell

no headers are included?

from telnet you're typing:

"GET / HTTP/1.0"
press enter

and should see:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 21:44:50 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.0.4pl1
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.0.4pl1
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

html
body

and the rest of the page

if the headers are missing i'd remove php and try again with a static html page. something is screwy and needs to be reinstalled.

Anon

Well, before I was just typing "GET /URI" rather than "GET /URI HTTP/1.0". When I typed the latter, I got this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 02:36:28 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Win32) PHP/4.1.1
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.1.1
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<head>

...and the rest. So I guess the no headers thing can be ignored; there are, in fact, headers. For some reason, when I log the telnet session, the ending is always missing in the log, even though it displays in the window. I'm not sure if this means anything. I know I'm grasping at strings here, I'm just completely out of ideas... thanks for your help thus far.

Anon

I should probably get an account here so I can edit my messages... anyway, what I meant to say was that the ending </html> is left out of the log, but it didn't show up in my previous message because I didn't entity-ise the chevrons...

linus

Well, I also tried resinstalling FoxServ (ok, so I can't install the stuff manually for the life of me...), with a more recent version, still no luck. Just bumping this thread back up...

Yay! I registered here..

linus

http://nagoya.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win32/#xpbug

I think that's what was afflicting me, it really sounds similar to what I was experiencing. Anyone else with a problem like this, take a look (although I doubt anyone does 🙂.