MSIE download troubles

[Mansoor Peerbhoy]

Hi

I cannot be sure, but I remember, a long time ago, having to use the BrowserMatch force-no-vary hack for MSIE.
The error that you are getting from MSIE was exactly the one I used to see.

Google around for "force-no-vary" and see if the first post makes any sense to you

It appeared that MSIE choked when the "Vary" header was sent in the HTTP response.
Of course, I may be completely off track here, but can you check the following:

Sniff the HTTP packets between your browser and NGINX. See if you are getting the "Vary" response being sent back to you from NGINX.
Grepping through an older version of nginx (0.5.30), I can see that NGINX doesn't do anything special with the Vary header. So possibly, your app server needs to be told not to send back the vary header for MSIE browsers

Again, I may be completely off-track, but is your app server Apache ? If I remember aright, using mod_rewrite caused the Vary header to be sent back in some cases, and that choked IE

Hope this helps

Regards
Mansoor


----- "Martin Eggen" <martin.eggen at gmail.com> wrote:

| From: "Martin Eggen" <martin.eggen at gmail.com>
| To: nginx at sysoev.ru
| Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 9:06:47 PM GMT +05:30 Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi
| Subject: MSIE download troubles
|
| Hi,
| I have a pretty standard nginx reverse proxy set up, nginx 0.6.31
| terminates SSL
| and forwards requests to application server.
| 
| Said application (portal) has some files available for download,
| Internet
| Explorer fails to load these, for some reason I haven't figured out.
| Explorer gives the error "cannot download file (..) The requested site
| is either
| unavailable or cannot be found". However, there are no errors in the
| logs, and a
| dump shows that Explorer indeed loads the entire file (but fails to
| open it
| properly).
| 
| Other browsers work without problems, and Explorer loads and opens the
| files
| perfectly if requesting them directly from the portal (bypassing the
| proxy).
| 
| My config contains the following:
| 
| sendfile on;
| keepalive_timeout  65;
| gzip off;
| client_max_body_size    10m;
| client_body_buffer_size 128k;
| 
| Any hints how to please IE? 
| 
| regards,
| Martin