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Developer confused by intranets =P

So I've got a dev IIS server running on the local network with a fixed IP. I've got a few applications setup in IIS bound to different ports.

I get the strangest behavior: If I load a page via IP address & port, it writes the correct response (as seen in my debugging proxy) but hangs with a white page for a long time while chrome says "waiting for" and it's an incorrect IP address unrelated to the server or application.

The browser actually tries to make a second request to a wrong IP, and it somehow manages to hold up the display of the page. Happens in FF and Chrome as indicated by Fiddler.

It does this for several different apps on different ports, and each one does the same thing but with a different incorrect IP for each one. It waits to connect to wrong local intranet IP. I pinged one, and it's not even an assigned IP on the network.

I can repeat this on a machine without a debugging proxy, and none of the incorrect IPs show up anywhere in the projects.

I'm not sure we even have a DNS server configured. We are a small company with no IT services. What I did was fix the IP address on the adapter of the server.

If I deploy the same apps to an external facing server with proper domains/DNS they work fine.

FlavorScape
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1 Answers1

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If you don't have crazy redirects happening on the site, it sounds like the client browser might be trying to use a proxy to get somewhere else.

This suggests you're either using a badly-constructed PAC (/WPAD) file, or the proxy settings aren't appropriate for the task.

Turn off all proxy settings in the browser, reopen the browser, and see if the symptom's the same.

If your browser supports network capturing (IE9 with F12 dev tools, Fiddler, etc) you might see the source of the problem that way.

(assuming Wireshark + reading that capture is not immediately intuitive for you).

TristanK
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  • No redirects. I just don't understand where the second request is coming from. It actually loads all the external CSS and JS files-- it just gets blocked by the random request, which I do see in fiddler. – FlavorScape May 02 '12 at 00:32
  • You don't think its the actual hosts file on the server itself? Er, wait, I guess IIS sets that binding... – FlavorScape May 02 '12 at 00:36
  • Can reproduce without proxy. – FlavorScape May 02 '12 at 02:00
  • What's the request for? (and arguably more importantly, can you see an earlier server response which includes the URL the client's trying to access?) – TristanK May 02 '12 at 03:42
  • So, with more inspecting, I request a page at say 10.0.1.115:2020/register.aspx which returns some HTML. I then get 302 redirects for the linked CSS files to some random IP 10.0.1.75 and without filename (so not 10.0.1.75/style.css) just the IP. weird, right? and all this works fine on the actual server. – FlavorScape May 02 '12 at 20:47