2008/10/30

Safari (or other WebKit) browser fails on secondary/internal pages

This is a a REALLY weird one, that I've been tearing my hair out, for several months:

You open a website and it loads fine; click on an internal link (a sub-page, search, whatever) and it fails - with a WebKit browser like Safari.

It's not a connectivity problem, though that's what it looks like at first.

As a matter of fact, browsers base on a non-WebKit rendering engine (ex: Firefox or Camino) are fine.

Safari gets the SYN/ACK from the target webserver and then *nothing* more from it; Safari just keeps resending the http request.

Wireshark shows "[TCP retransmission] [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]" for the packets Safari sends after the Mac ACKs the webserver's SYN/ACK. This sends you looking for things like MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit), PMTU (Path MTU) and MSS (Maximum Segment Size) though it won't help.

My IS Director, Nate Herzog

http://isitcreative.blogspot.com/

just found the solution on MacInTouch

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/safari3/topic4614.html

and I found some more chatter about it, using the search terms from that article, such as Ed Marczak's

http://www.radiotope.com/content/safari-and-sonicwall

I'm blogging here, with a few more keywords, in the hope it'll save someone else some hair-tearing! :)

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