[ic] Problems: long winded explanation, and request for help.

[David Christensen]

On Dec 1, 2010, at 5:48 PM, Adam Lambert wrote:

> On 12/1/2010 3:30 PM, DB wrote:
>>> No, no mod_rewrite going on. I think IC does some
>>> redirecting/redirection as part of the deal, but I'm not 100% sure what
>>> that is, or where to find it.   This site processes hundreds of orders
>>> per day without issue, so whatever it is, it works right 90%+ of the
>>> time. 
>> Given the "hanging" behavior followed by that browser error message, I
>> think it's certain you have a looping issue somewhere. If not in Apache,
>> then maybe a DNS forwarding issue - or maybe something misconfigured in
>> IC itself such as your secure URLs. Tracking it down may take some time.
>> 
>> I've seen identical behavior. In my case, I had my DNS service
>> forwarding domain.com to www.domain.com, but I had a direct link to a
>> "http://domain.com/..." url on one of my IC pages which lived on
>> www.domain.com. I got long hangs followed by that browser error.
>> 
>> Look for some type of pattern in the situations where the issue occurs.
> 
> But in those situations, did it display the behavior 100% of the time? 
> Or just in very rare instances (and were those instances repeatable)?  
> My IC setup works correctly to the tune of thousands of orders per week,
> processed without incident, so much so, that I have been totally unable
> to reproduce these errors myself, despite days and weeks of effort to do so.
> 
> After reviewing the various relevant configs, I am confident that it's
> not redirecting anywhere in Apache, and it's not redirecting anything
> via DNS.   The only redirection I'm aware of that happens here, is
> whatever happens when IC processes the request to add an item to the
> cart.    Also, bear in mind, that the symptoms I'm seeing here can be
> 'fixed' by restoring IE to factory default or startring FireFox in safe
> mode.   So, it's some setting in the browser (or perhaps a plugin?) that
> is interacting with IC when this kind of thing occurs.


This smells like the browser's UserAgent string is being identified incorrectly as a robot; if you can identify the hits in your apache logs, look at the UserAgent string for something like the AskTB or something which would match the RobotUA directive.  This would also explain why a fresh reinstall of the browser (without the toolbar) would result in a working order.

You can add explicit exceptions for individual toolbar plugins, or see the more wide-ranging solution of adding MSIE and Gecko to NotRobotUA.

HTH,

David
--
David Christensen
End Point Corporation
david at endpoint.com