I get this weird behaviour from all browsers when trying to send this form. This form has only 2 fields, a title and the article body. The form defaults to application/x-www-form-urlencoded. When submitted the site sometimes responds with a 404.
The log below is taken directly from Live HTTP Headers.
http://www.faulty-domain.com/article-page POST /article-page HTTP/1.1 Host: www.faulty-domain.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729) 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: 115 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.faulty-domain.com/article-page Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 3288 blog_title=Article+Title+to+save&newsbody=%3Cp%3EThe+current+blah+blah+blah%3C%2Fp%3E HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:42:23 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.14 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.14 Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache Location: http://www.faulty-domain.com/notFound Content-Encoding: gzip Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Length: 26 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html
The page tries to send to itself, then is suppose to check if the method was post and various validation checks, the usual stuff. But then, the http response is a 404 not found page.
Our internal framework works like Code Igniter, such that all request will execute index.php. Clearly the web server did not even try to execute index.php, but decided based on the request headers somehow that the response should be a 404.
Now I've done my own debugging, and played with the article I'm sending. I tried to append the article paragraph by paragraph and see on what paragraph the bug triggers. The form submits fine until a certain paragraph, at that point I said Bingo! I thought I isolated the problem and tried to submit the form using that paragraph alone, but then the form submitted. Which now puzzles me, why would the web server accept it as it is, but if appended on the end of the original article, it goes nuts!
It's probably an htaccess thing, or a web server thing, but I just couldn't get this thing nailed.
Update:
For all those that requested to view the post data being sent, heres a link. I will delete the file after a week or so. http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/temp/faulty-article.html
Here is a piece of the htaccess that might help. Basically our index.php determines what controller to call based on what value $mod receives.
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ /$1 [R]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !mod= [NC]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ /index.php?mod=$1 [L]
Also, if ever it might help, this is the error that gets log on apache error_log
"POST /write-article HTTP/1.1" 302 26 "http://www.faulty-domain.com/write-article" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 Firefox/3.6.24 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
"GET /notFound HTTP/1.1" 404 7635 "http://www.faulty-domain.com/write-article" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111103 Firefox/3.6.24 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)"
