Forum OpenACS Q&A: Images getting lost with ns_returnfile on Win

It could ... are there any errors in the log?  Normally when a socket is dropped on a file upload such as this an error is returned to AOLserver and it dutifully logs it.

My experience shows that *any* binary file stored in OpenACS (3.2.5, 4.x) when running on Windows gets totally messed up and is never properly returned.  I've tried to find out why, to no avail: it does get properly stored in database, but somewhere between a SELECT and an ns_return things go haywire...

David:

I'm sorry, this is not yet a site connected to the Internet.

But I used Ethereal to view the page headers sent between the client and AOLserver.

It seems like Opera and IE both send "If-Modified-Since" Keys and AOLserver responds happily with "304 Not Modified" but only Opera renders the images then.
Maybe this path is worth investigating on.

I first thought the problem is related with a "max-age" key (of 3600 seconds) I'm returning in the header with the file as AOLserver itself returns also a "Last-Modified-Since" and maybe the two keys conflict (Unexcusable non-reading of Cache/Proxy Documentation on my part...). Strange thing.

Do you know where to start/tweak configs to FORCE the server to never respond with a L-M-S key? I'll try to overwrite this in my script now but I'll guess it happens somewhere else.

Ok, I know more:

I have to ns_set idelkey [ns_conn headers] "Last-Modified" to force ns_returnfile to not ignore the status code of "200" I call it with. When I do it, Int. Explorer always receives the images with ns_returnfile - I validated this with Ethereal.

BUT! this §&$&§& IE does not render them.

I give up. Never try to understand your computer.

The following looks pretty normal. As I said, the problem only starts to occurr the second or third page (with 10 images per page). Request with Internet Explorer 6.0:

GET /images/img.adp?img_id=171

Accept: */*

Referer: http://intra:8000/people/col1/browse.adp?step=30

Accept-Language: en

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)

Host: intra:8000

Connection: Keep-Alive




Answer AOLserver to Internet Explorer 6.0:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

Cache-control: max-age=3600

Last-Modified: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 10:14:37 GMT

MIME-Version: 1.0

Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 15:03:14 GMT

Server: AOLserver/3.4

Content-Type: image/jpeg

Content-Length: 13129

Connection: keep-alive




(Image is not rendered)

Request with Opera 6.0:

GET /images/img.adp?img_id=173

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98) Opera 6.0

Accept: text/html, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, //*/*

Accept-Language: en

Accept-Encoding: defalte, gzip, x-gzip, identity, *;q=0

Referer: http://intra:8000/people/col1/browse.adp?step=30

If-Modified-Since: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 08:06:42 GMT

Host: intra:8000

Connection: Keep-Alive, TE

TE: deflate, gzip, chunked, identity, trailers




Answer AOLserver to Opera 6.0:

HTTP/1.0 304 Not Modified

Cache-control: max-age=3600

Last-Modified: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 08:06:42 GMT

MIME-Version: 1.0

Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 15:17:33 GMT

Server: AOLserver/3.4

Connection: close

(Image is rendered, in general, I have no problem with Opera or Netscape or ...)

I have finaly found that my problem was with the images file themself !