04 March 2013, 11:28

We have a brand new 1.6 installation (January 2013) which was recently updated to 1.6.3 (22 February).

Users have recently begun reporting that they are unable to save edited content outside our organisational network. Users are able to login and edit content but when they try to save it just keeps “processing” and eventually times out. This issue was first reported prior to the recent updates being applied so we can rule that out.

We have replicated the issue reported across various browsers (IE 8, 9 & 10, and Firefox and Chrome) and differing computer configuration.

During troubleshooting we have also now identified that content can be edited and successfully saved on an iPad outside the network (both 3g and wireless network on an original iPad).

Any advice the community can offer would be greatly appreciated :)

Our ICT team may send me though additional information that I will add to this post once it has been received.

04 March 2013, 14:07

The "external" (i.e. internet) and internal network are separated by a reverse proxy, though this is configured to be purely transparent and hasn't caused problems with other similar sites like Moodle. Doing a side-by-side comparison of the web content delivered to the client, the HTTP headers and page source is identical (minus unique user identifiers) for both internal and external users.

If I log in as myself while within the internal network and fill out a text box, the web browser will POST the contents while accessing the URL http://<server name>/view/blocks.php?id=1383 - this succeeds. The difference here is that when externally I try the same thing, the web browser will again try to POST the contents, though the URL it tries to get to is now http://<server name>/view/%22%22. As this URL is invalid, the web server declines the request, at which point the web page hangs.

07 March 2013, 12:13

Interesting, %22%22 is the urlencoded form of "". I wonder how the URL is getting changed. A couple of questions that might help troubleshoot this:

1. If you look at the "action" field of the <form> tag on the page, what URL does it show?

2. Are you using Mahara's "clean urls" configuration, by chance? ( https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Clean_URL_Configuration )

Cheers,
Aaron