IRIX really is the devil's spawn...

[Marc Slemko <ma...@znep.com>]

>Path: scanner.worldgate.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-feed4.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-feed1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!lhc.nlm.nih.gov!not-for-mail
>From: Paul Schnake <pa...@nlm.nih.gov>
>Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix
>Subject: Apache 1.2.4 MIME Type Problem - Solution!
>Date: Fri, 02 Jan 1998 14:58:10 -0500
>Organization: National Center for Biotechnology Information
>Lines: 34
>Message-ID: <34...@nlm.nih.gov>
>Reply-To: pauls@nlm.nih.gov
>NNTP-Posting-Host: mars.nlm.nih.gov
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4u)
>Xref: scanner.worldgate.com comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix:36990     

Background:  When downloading files from an Apache 1.2.4 of a particular
MIME type,
the file would get "jumbled" somewhere along the way.  If you did
multiple downloads
of the same file you would find that they were the same size, but using
diff or
md5 would show that they were different, as if they were reordered. 
This did not
happen when the proxy was bypassed.  The proxy machines were two SGI
Challenge S's
running IRIX 6.2.

After getting some hints from Mark Slemko, it seemed the problem was
with IRIX.
I then patched the OS to make sure that it was current, compiled Apache
without the
-n32 option and obtained a special patched version of Apache from Mark,
none of
which helped.  

Fortunately, we were planning on upgrading the systems to a pair of
Origin 200s
which run IRIX 6.4.  (For whatever reason, 6.4 is not available for
Challenge S
machines.)  This corrected the problem.  So, there is clearly a problem
with
network buffering in the IRIX 6.2 code.

-- 
Paul Schnake, WWW Administrator
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
301-435-5956
301-480-9241 FAX