php redirection - HTML headers

Question

I have many redirections within a VM webserver, which work when browsing the server with the embedded navigator (iceweasel). But that does not work when accessing the server from the hosting machine's browsers (tested with FF4/IE8/Chrome/Opera11).

All experienced redirecting methods are driving to a "server not available or overloaded" in the hosting machine browsers.

If you could have a look to the headers from the apache logs and give some hints about the differences (main one looks to be the GET url, provided that the same code is operating):

Working request leads to this log :

cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep 127 | grep random | tail -n1   
127.0.0.1 - authuserid [26/Jun/2011:11:11:52 +0200]    
"GET /index.php?page=100 HTTP/1.1" 200 49151
"https://www.mydomain.foo/index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788&random=c0117685e7e65a307989c219efc587b4&sid=n7en2it41h2gumrcq3kmmil3c0&sidf=.ps_AWDkIY"
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.19) Gecko/2011050718 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-3)"

Non working request leads to this log :

cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep 192 | grep random | tail -n1   
www.mydomain.org:80 192.168.X.Y - authuserid [26/Jun/2011:11:08:07 +0200]  
"GET  /index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788&random=685de8bcd4d198d6ad7f3cf4b23de5b7 HTTP/1.1" 302 -
"http://www.mydomain.foo/index.php?page=xyz"    
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1"

I can't show the header response as I don't get a response and no error reported by apache (loglevel=error).

Thx

Controls done :
I have increased the browsers timeout (FF: network.http.keep-alive.timeout to 3600s : no change.
I checked that no headers were sent previously to the redirection : ok (a dump of headers_sent() shows no headers sent nor blank line or space in the includes, )
I have increased the Apache server timeout just in case: no change
I made sure of using an absolute url as of HTTP/1.1. I tried php, html meta and js redirect: no change

EDIT 1:

Here are the headers as seen by LiveHTTPHeaders in the "non working" case :

---

http://www.mydomain.org/menus/noeud4.php
POST /menus/noeud4.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mydomain.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Language: fr,fr-fr;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-15,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 3600
DNT: 1
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.mydomain.org/index.php?page=890
Cookie: PHPSESSID=4bge5gg1rgkit78k3seqlfcbq2
Authorization: Basic aW52aXRlZEBjYW1hY2FzYTp5b3VybXlndWVzdEB0b2RheQ==
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 98
login=my_superlogin1&pwd1=vbigpass3xqz%40A2L&captcha=91690& source=noeud4.php&>formulaire_valide=SOUMETTRE
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:17:27 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.1 mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2 >mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g PHP/5.3.3
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.mydomain.org/index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=60
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html

---

http://www.mydomain.org/index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788
GET /index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mydomain.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8
Accept-Language: fr,fr-fr;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-15,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 3600
DNT: 1
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.mydomain.org/index.php?page=890
Cookie: PHPSESSID=4bge5gg1rgkit78k3seqlfcbq2
Authorization: Basic aW52aXRlZEBjYW1hY2FzYTp5b3VybXlndWVzdEB0b2RheQ==

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:19:59 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.1 mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2 >mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g PHP/5.3.3 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: https://www.mydomain.org/index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788&sid=4bge5gg1rgkit78k3seqlfcbq2&sidf=.ps_Z5wRio
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=60
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html

---

EDIT2: Comparing both cases of request/responses (working/not working), I isolated the following 2 main differences among others :

On the "working" responses :
Status : 200 which I don't have on the "non working" reponse, but I do not understand why.

on the "NON Working" response :
DNT:1
which stands for the option Do Not Track (me) from FF4.
So I tried to deactivate this option, but same result.

I may miss sthg for sure. All looks as if the server was down. Maybe the session cookie (76 kb) is too big. I also tried downgrading firefox 4 to 3.6 as this another changed parameter, but I still get the same response with FF3.6 as FF4.

Answer 1

As you can see in the requests you posted you try to hit: http://www.mydomain.org/menus/noeud4.php but you get redirected to http://www.mydomain.org/index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788 and then again to https://www.mydomain.org/index.php?page=100&new_session=a4da9106dba2ffd40345a5eb624d7788&sid=4bge5gg1rgkit78k3seqlfcbq2&sidf=.ps_Z5wRio

Does it keep sending out 302 headers?

I'm guessing the noeud4.php script is some login script that will likely create a session and probably set some cookies. My guess would be to check if that is being done correctly - and figure out why it's throwing the 302.