Really... wow... I knew Microsoft was crap but just damn, 'I' don't even believe this one.
I'm setting up some of the web site for my company. And I set up an error page, the error is in fact a re-direct. We do most of our testing in Firefox because none of us really like IE, however we do some testing in IE, we don't normally think to test the error page in both however. I mean, why would you.. it's an error page.. and a REALLY simple one at that. Here is the page:
<html><head>
<META http-equiv=refresh content="0;URL=[company url]">
</head><body bgcolor="#404040">
</body></html>
How much more simple can you get than that?
We pass through dev, and qa but in staging we can't get it to work. Well, staging is a different group and they test in IE. Well the error page is this weird generic 403 forbidden page none of us are familiar with. We think it's a network problem and spend 3 hours testing the network not understanding why these 15 servers in one vlan bring up the 403 error and all the other server connect fine.
We give up on the network as it seems to be working fine. Well, I finally found the problem. It's a bug in IE... sort of... the claim to have done it on purpose.
If an error message is smaller than 512 bytes IE throws it out and pulls up it's own error message.... No, I'm not kidding... I put a string of spaces in the file to bring it larger than 512 bytes and it works fine.
from the Microsoft page: "Because IIS 4.0 does not strictly follow RFC 2616, it returns Active Server Pages (ASP)-based Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) errors with a status code of 200."
what is their fix? "We strongly recommend that all users upgrade to Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003."
Why does this fix it? it seems IIS puts a large asp buffer in all it's errors. No matter what you set your error page to it adds this buffer... thus 'fixing' the problem...
You think I'm kidding? try it out.... or read the Microsoft page on it (the page below is specifically for the 500 error but it's the same for any error):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q294807/![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
