[Pmwiki-users] update on pmwiki page load problem

[Davis, James C.]

I have solved the page load problem I was having, but I still do not know
its exact cause. It turns out that upgrading php from 4.1.2-7 to 4.1.2-7.3.4
fixed it. The former is the original version distributed with RedHat 7.3 and
the latter is an update released for 7.3. Again, the only php script that I
had a problem with was pmwiki and it only affected machines behind a
firewall or NAT. I confirmed this by doing some testing at home with my
d-link router. When I put my machine behind the router (which uses NAT, not
allowing incoming connections), it stopped working. When I put my machine in
the DMZ, so that all ports were open, it worked fine. This was very
consistent. I still don't know why it would behave this way (is the server
trying to initiate connections to the client and waiting for them to time
out before serving the page?), but it looks like it was a php bug that was
just triggered by pmwiki. Anyways, just wanted to let everyone know in case
anyone tries to run pmwiki on a stock install of RedHat 7.3.

James Davis

-----Original Message-----
From: Davis, James C. [mailto:jdavis at cob.tamucc.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 6:13 PM
To: 'pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com'
Subject: [Pmwiki-users] update on pmwiki page load problem


I have done some more testing on the page load problem that I posted to the
list a couple of weeks ago. In case you don't remember, I am having trouble
with some, but not all computers accessing our WikiWikiWeb. On certain
computers (only seems to be some computers on our firewalled subnet) it
takes 3-4 minutes for each wiki page to load. I have found something very
interesting. The problem seems to follow the NIC card.

Scenario:

Two test machines configured similarly: Windows 2000, IE 5.5, same model NIC
card.
Machine A - wiki pages load immediately
Machine B - wiki pages load after 3-4 minutes

I swap the NIC cards so that A gets B's and B gets A's.

After swap:

Machine A - wiki pages load after 3-4 minutes
Machine B - wiki pages load immediately

Swapping the immediate-loading card in to another slow-loading machine had
the same results.

I ran in to something like this when trying to set up a WINS server after
our client machines went behind the firewall. Some machines could see the
PDC fine, and some could not. This problem also followed the NIC card. I
finally ended up putting IPX on everything so the clients could find the
servers. This was not something I wanted to do, but was the only way I could
get it to work at the time. (Windows 2000 DNS now eliminates the need for
this kludge)

My conclusion so far would be that this is a networking problem, but I will
have to do more in depth tests to be sure. I will try to capture network
traffic during a page request from a working and non-working machine to
compare.

Please let me know if you have any insight in to this. I know firewalls can
sometimes do some weird things, but I've never heard of one doing this.

Thanks,

James Davis
Network Manager
College of Business
Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
(361) 825-5926
jdavis at cob.tamucc.edu

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