POST form triggers bad GET submission

[kirk.hedden]

I have a form declared as the following:

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="abc.php">

For most users, everything works fine with no issues whatsoever. But
there is one user that continues complaining about being unable to use
the site. I have looked at the access_log and discovered that the
user's browser is submitting the form via a GET request rather than a
POST.

Here is the log entry:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [13/Jul/2005:14:08:05 -0400] "GET /dot.php
HTTP/1.0" 302 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT
5.0)"

The 302 response is because I notice some POST vars missing and
re-direct back to the page with the form on it.

Every other user has no problems and the form is submitted as a POST,
as expected.

If the user that's having problems keeps trying to submit the form,
sooner or later it will work fine -- suddenly they are able to POST.
The last time I checked, it took them 5 or 6 submittals before it
worked.

I should also add that the user is not just one person -- it's a
company. Everyone at that company has problems as described. Different
computers, even. All are using IE as far as I can tell, but other
clients (at other companies) are using IE as well without issue.

This is really boggling my mind. It's a fairly simple page with a
single form on it. The only way to get to "abc.php" is through this one
POST form. I don't suspect that the client is trying to hack in, or has
abc.php bookmarked, or some other sane reason that would explain the
GET.

I've tried and tried with different browsers to re-create the issue and
cannot.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?

Apache 2.0.54
PHP 4.3.11

 

[Mitja]

I have a form declared as the following:

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="abc.php">

For most users, everything works fine with no issues whatsoever. But
there is one user that continues complaining about being unable to use
the site. I have looked at the access_log and discovered that the
user's browser is submitting the form via a GET request rather than a
POST.
[...]
I should also add that the user is not just one person -- it's a
company. Everyone at that company has problems as described. Different
computers, even. All are using IE as far as I can tell, but other
clients (at other companies) are using IE as well without issue.

Have you, at any previous stage, used GET in this form? First thing I'd
think of is that users are being served a cached version of the page.
Could be local cache (ie IE's) or maybe they're using a proxy. Just to
make sure, restart apache to clear the cache there.

 

[kirk.hedden]

As far as I can remember, this form has always been POST. I've been in
contact with some of their tech guys and they do indeed use a proxy.
I'll ask them to clear their cache for us, but beyond that I'm not sure
how a proxy might interfere.

Any ideas?

I'll also be adding pragma statements to our pages to prevent caching.

 

[kirk.hedden]

Replying to myself here.

Talked to their techs and they weren't able to trace the traffic due to
the SSL encryption. They also told me that their proxy won't cache SSL
traffic, so the caching changes probably don't matter, I'm guessing.

Another problem in addition to the POST/GET error I detailed above:
occassionally they get the "page could not be found" IE error -- not a
404, but the local IE error -- for our site.

Could there be some kind of weird incompatability with SSL and their
proxy? Or some misconfiguration with SSL on their proxy? What bugs me
is that no other customer has any problems like this at all, which is
why I'm pointing the finger at their proxy.

Anyway, this has gone off-topic for this group, but if anyone has ideas
I'd love to hear them!