general/1801: Netscape Navigator gets text/plain return of index.htm

[Geof Goodrum <Ge...@noaa.gov>]

>Number:         1801
>Category:       general
>Synopsis:       Netscape Navigator gets text/plain return of index.htm
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Fri Feb 13 10:30:00 PST 1998
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Geoffrey.P.Goodrum@noaa.gov
>Organization:
apache
>Release:        1.2.5
>Environment:
On Linux kernel 2.0.31 using RedHat 5.0 (Intel), apache 1.2.5-1 rpm.
Pentium 166 with software RAID-5.
Netscape Navigator 4.03 for Win95
>Description:
I searched the bug reports and posted on USENET for two days w/o reply.

Netscape Navigator 4.x returns an index.htm page as plain text from /docs directory, but the exact same page works under NCSA httpd v1.5.2a on an AIX 4.2 system, and on the same Linux/Apache system in a /test directory.  Permissions are identical on both Apache server HTML files and directories.  Fully specifying the page as /docs/index.htm in the URL also returns the web page properly.

MSIE and Lynx do not exhibit this problem; the page returns as text/html.  I've checked BrowserMatch, AddType, and other configuration entries, but have not found a configuration error that explains this behavior.
>How-To-Repeat:
Compare Apache 1.2.5/Netscape Navigator 4.0x results for http://perigee.ncdc.noaa.gov/docs/, http://perigee.ncdc.noaa.gov/docs/index.htm, and http://perigee.ncdc.noaa.gov/test/.  The NCSA server is at http://www2.ncdc.noaa.gov/docs/.

This is an auto-forwarding page (meta expire tag) after five seconds.  The page links in the Apache /test directory are broken.
>Fix:
No.  Either this is a very obscure bug, or a strange configuration error.  Your assistance would be appreciated!  I added 'BrowserMatch "^Mozilla/[2-4]" force-response-1.0' in httpd.conf just in case this was a 1.1 compatibility issue, but the problem remains.  Thanks%2
>Audit-Trail:
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