Is Comcast blocking large HTTP POST transactions?
Comcast
I’m not sure when this started happening, but I can’t seem to isolate the problem and I’m assuming that Comcast is to blame. I’m running this blog on a PC in my house connected to the interWeb via Comcast residential high speed Internet. I’m keeping DNS humming along using DynDNS even though my “dynamic” IP address (via DHCP) has not changed since the Adelphia to Comcast migration (and hadn’t changed on Adelphia prior to that migration). Even before I was running this blog, I had a wiki using MediaWiki running (it still is).
Here’s what’s happening….I can add a comment or a new wiki page (which is an HTTP POST transaction) from home or remotely (outside of my LAN). However, I’m limited to the size of my comments (or wiki pages) when I’m remote (outside of my LAN). Once I get more than a paragraph or so in a comment (or a wiki page) and hit “send” my browser just hangs. Incidentally, this also happens when creating a blog post while logged in to WordPress.
I decided to run a test and had tail running on my apache server logs. I noticed that when remote and creating small posts that my Web server would see the transaction and it would be posted. I followed this with a large post and my Web server never registered the hit and my browser just hung.
I know for a fact that I created and edited several of the large posts on the wiki when I was away from home, so I know that this “issue” is new, but I’m just not sure how new.
Anyone have any suggestions or have a similar problem? If so, please post a comment below, but keep it short as if it’s long it won’t be posted…..
Well i hate to agree with something as horibble as this. My Company hosts a webmail product that requires lots of HTTP POSTS, After starting to hear talk of a possible issue with random failed events in the webmail client.
i started a journey which ended with ngreping the traffic between my host and the destination server … After compareing the events on either side it looks like any large packets starting with the word POST are not makeing it to there destintation but oddly enough if it was broken accross 2 packets the second half would make it.
Further proof of this, I redirected traffic to the server through a secure VPN and everything was just dandy :/ …. I will be calling comcast tomorrow with 40k clients useing our systems This is not Cool.
I think this issue has been cleared up. As recently as a few days ago I was still having the issue with posting to my server (on my Comcast HSD account). However, today I have edited a large post and done many things which until recently were only working from my home network.