I noticed in early August that I was unable to get to SharePoint Online sites, most Microsoft Update pages, Microsoft Support pages, Microsoft.com, etc. as they all appeared to be returning a blank page. From within our corporate network we haven't been able to view the vast majority of Microsoft websites without setting the User Agent string to IE 10 (otherwise the body of the HTML page is styled to visibility: hidden;).
It turns out that MS has been directing web-clients using IE 11 and Chrome to a WebTrends.com hosted JS file w/ a URL path that's over 3.3 KB's in length and was being blocked by our corporate WatchGuard firewall (HTTP 413). This JS file contains only 157 characters (seems to defeat the purpose of optimizing, doesn't it?) Link Here
For now it appears as though the only workarounds are to:
- Set User agent strings to Internet Explorer 10 or lower, so we aren't directed to such grotesquely long URL's.
- Ask IT to modify our WatchGuard System Settings to not check URL Path Lengths (because apparently it's o.k. now if you're Microsoft to use URL's of undefined lengths).
I cannot consider any reasonable excuse for the URL schema webtrends uses or how MS justifies using library URL's encoded into the kilobytes.
I suppose what I'd like to know from the perspective's of other members is:
Do you believe that URL Path Length restrictions are actually effective from protecting against infected web-clients?
I'm curious if it's reasonable to ask IT to remove URL Path Length checks from the WatchGuard firewall.
