I have apache 2 working in several production environments and am now ready to move it into production on a new bank of servers. The servers are unusual as they are virtualized by a product called virtuozzo, think usermode linux. Anyway apache 2 runs fine on the test servers I have set up but when moved to these environments exhibit some very stange behavior. The environment is a updated, modified and hardened redhat 7.1/7.3 and the apache 2 packages I have tried are internal (50km version 2.0.43) and the redhat 8 2.0.40 compiled for the 7.3 environment. Both work fine in a test environment under kernel 2.4.2-2 or 2.4.9. The servers are running a virtuozzo provided 2.4.9 (I have no easy control over this) so really the only difference is in the kernel from test production systems. Here is where things get strange. Apache installs and works fine through https (mod_ssl 2.0.40 or 2.0.43) or using php (4.2.3) to generate pages. However when it comes to serving regular static pages over http it fails. The nature of this failure is such: cannot serve a static page over 255 bytes The telnet log shows this behavior: Escape character is '^]'. GET /index5.html HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 22:58:10 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux) Last-Modified: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 07:48:15 GMT ETag: "544064-940-66de0dc0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 2368 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html X-Pad: avoid browser bug with a file under 255 bytes: Escape character is '^]'. GET /index.html HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 23:01:13 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux) Last-Modified: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 07:46:20 GMT ETag: "544068-9b-60034b00" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 155 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html This is test content. [other sentence redacted] Connection closed by foreign host. So the difference is the X-pad: avoid browser bug line ?? after exhaustive searching I haven't been able to find out much about that other than it is normal in some circumstances. Anyway apache feels the need to erroneously close the connection. This behavior also generates an error in the logs as follows [info] (22)Invalid argument: core_output_filter: writing data to the network This error would typically occur if the browser user were to hit the stop button, but that is not the case here. It gets weirder, mozilla and internet explorer can get http pages over 255 bytes if keepalives are set on, however gets for images are closed at 0 byte, with the above error. I can't for the life of me figure out what is going on, except to conclude it is realted to very subtle things in the kernel, the problem is that it would be a huge pain for me to change the kernel again or an apache bug. I am happy to try anything version/compile/package wise as I would really like to move these servers over to apache 2. I have reinstalled, recompiled, upgraded glibc (currently 2.2.4-31), upgrade the compiler I compiled apache with (currently gcc-2.96-112.7.1). Let me know if you have any leads. I have pretty exhaustively search google, deja, apache mailng lists etc. All i found was this deja link http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22apache+2%22+%22avoid+browser+bug%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=0 to an earlier bug with php and apache. That post leads me to believe this is an apache bug. But that illustrates the real weirdness here that php and anything over ssl work fine, it is just static html that has the problem. Thanks for the help. Sincerely, David Uhlman CTO 50km Inc.