Why does browser sends HTTP GET requests that return empty responses?

Question

I tried to post this question on serverfault but no luck so far.

I have a local testing environment in a Fedora virtual machine. Strangely, resources (css and js files) don't seem to load. Looking at Firebug, I see that the browser sends the HTTP request with "Range bytes=0-". The server responds with either an empty 200 OK or an empty 206 Partial Content.

Here is an example:

    Response Headers
    Date    Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:33:26 GMT
    Server  Apache/2.2.13 (Fedora)
    Last-Modified   Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:58:55 GMT
    Etag    "18-3aec-478c14dbee138"
    Accept-Ranges   bytes
    Content-Length  15084
    Content-Range   bytes 0-15083/15084
    Connection  close
    Content-Type    text/css

    Request Headers
    Host    fedora.test
    User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091105 Fedora/3.5.5-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.5
    Accept  text/css,*/*;q=0.1
    Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
    Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
    Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
    Keep-Alive  300
    Connection  keep-alive
    Referer http://fedora.test/pictures/
    Cookie  __utma=26341546.1613992749.1258504422.1258569125.1258752550.4; __utmz=26341546.1258504422.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); PHPSESSID=tqf8jfmc77qihe97rl4tmhq685
    Range   bytes=0-
    If-Range    "18-3aec-478c14dbee138"

I don't know if the browser is sending the wrong request, or if it's the server that is doing this. Request made to the outside (such as google analytics) are working fine.

This is running in Fedora 11 in VirtualBox. Apache. PHP. The files are being served through the "shared folders" feature of VirtualBox (could it be related?).

First load (index.php):

    Response Headers
    Date    Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:40:46 GMT
    Server  Apache/2.2.13 (Fedora)
    X-Powered-By    PHP/5.2.9
    Expires Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
    Cache-Control   private
    Pragma  no-cache
    Connection  close
    Transfer-Encoding   chunked
    Content-Type    text/html; charset=UTF-8

    Request Headers
    Host    fedora.test
    User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091105 Fedora/3.5.5-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.5
    Accept  text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
    Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
    Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
    Keep-Alive  300
    Connection  keep-alive
    Cookie  PHPSESSID=ngh2n2co2gjj5kla6kafp85lh3; __utma=26341546.882012300.1259028363.1259028363.1259030442.2; __utmc=26341546; __utmz=26341546.1259028363.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); __utmb=26341546.1.10.1259030442

No error logs could help me.

few checkpoints, 1. did you try to copy to C:\ or somewhere other than directly loading those from shared folder? 2. did you try to clear your browser cache and confirm again? — YOU
Indeed, copying the files instead of using the shared-folder feature did help. Why? It can serve the php files just fine, why not the js and css files?? — Nathan H
What are the headers from the first page being requested? according to Wikipedia: If-Range: If the entity is unchanged, send me the part(s) that I am missing; otherwise, send me the entire new entity, if your code shares this Etag, the content could be found as duplicated and not downloaded — Ast Derek
I could swear there was a comment here asking me about the headers of the first request... disappeared! Anyways, I added them to my question. — Nathan H
I did clear all cache and connected from another browser on another computer, same thing — Nathan H

Chris Gutierrez Chris Gutierrez · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-24T03:01:43

I believe this is an issue with serving files in shared folders with virtual box. I had this exact same issue and was only able to resolve it moving the files to a non-shared directory. One thing you might try would be enabling followsymlinks. Unfortunately when I was having the issue, I couldn't find anyone else that was reporting similar issues.

Why does browser sends HTTP GET requests that return empty responses?

1 Answers