For future reference, it now appears that my problems submitting
lengthy posts to Forums were due solely to a subtly broken network
configuration on my end:
The Red Hat 7.3 box I was using appeared to be working fine.
However, it had several suspicious networking symptoms:
- The problem above posting long messages to openacs.org. This
happened with Mozilla 1.0.1, 1.4, and Netscape 4.79.
- When typing scp commands on the local box, scp from a remote
server to the local box worked, but scp from the local box to a remote
server would say 100% file transfer, then hang indefinitely with the
file at zero bytes on the remote server.
- ssh connections worked fine, but setting CVS_RSH=ssh and accessing
a remote CVS server would hang indefinitely.
- ssh -vX connections would appear to forward the X-Windows
connection successfully, but launching any remote X application would
lock up the ssh connection completely.
The solution? /etc/rc.d/rc.local was overriding the
ethernet MAC address something like so:
ifconfig eth0 hw ether $MAC
If you want to override the MAC address, that's the wrong place to do
it, as rc.local is executed too late in the boot process. If you
really want to do that, the right place (at least on Red Hat 7.3) is
in "
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0".
I did that, rebooted, and all the problems above went away. I did
not then try to replicat the problem by putting the MAC
address smashing back into rc.local - and I don't plan to. So I can't
be entirely sure, but I strongly suspect that the late overriding of
the MAC address was causing the weird network problems.
