Help In Resolving Safari Error

I just did a clean install of Leopard hoping to resolve some Safari issues we experience on one particular website that we MUST have access to.

After the clean install I tried to load the a page from this website and the following error comes up. Because of our current Leopard issues, I have not upgraded one of our other Macs and on that mac we see the pages without any issues.

When I try to view the pages of a particular site I get the following error:

The page cannot be found

The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Please try the following:

Make sure that the Web site address displayed in the address bar of your browser is spelled and formatted correctly.
If you reached this page by clicking a link, contact the Web site administrator to alert them that the link is incorrectly formatted.
Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Technical Information (for support personnel)

Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 404.
Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative Tasks, andAbout Custom Error Messages.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jan 30, 2008 12:40 PM

20 replies

tdorraugh Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 31, 2008 9:25 AM in response to tdorraugh

Hey everyone.... thanks for all the comments and suggestions. With your help, I have now convinced the programmer of the website that is a real issue. He has asked me to do one thing and I hope someone can guide me.

He has requested that I:

"What we really need to get to the bottom of this:

If someone gets a 404 page error - page cannot be found message...
we need to find out what URL the web browser is trying to open into that frame (in a pc, you right clikc on the error and choose properties... but on a mac, you probably hold down the mouse button for a couple seconds, and then there is some type of option to view the address... but i don't know that label off hand).

We need to compare that URL to what the correct URL should be and then that will shine some lite on the situation."

How do I find out what web browser the mac is trying to access? Is this the same a view source?

In advance, thank you for your time.

tdorraugh

Jan 31, 2008 1:33 PM in response to tdorraugh

Right click or Control click to open a menu on the link.
Copy the URL and paste it into an email for them to test.

Jan 31, 2008 2:47 PM in response to tdorraugh

tdorraugh wrote:
Hey everyone.... thanks for all the comments and suggestions. With your help, I have now convinced the programmer of the website that is a real issue. He has asked me to do one thing and I hope someone can guide me.

If someone gets a 404 page error - page cannot be found message...
we need to find out what URL the web browser is trying to open into that frame (in a pc, you right clikc on the error and choose properties... but on a mac, you probably hold down the mouse button for a couple seconds, and then there is some type of option to view the address... but i don't know that label off hand).

The developer should be able to get the URLs that are being requested but not found on the web server (ie the ones the server is returning the 404 error page for) in the IIS logs on the server. That will show exactly the URL that is being requested.

If IIS logging is not enabled on the web server, do this (on the console of the web server machine):

* In IIS administration, right-click on the web root that is serving that site, and select Properties.

* On the Web Site tab, make sure that Enable Logging is ticked, and that the dropdown for the logging format is set to W3C Extended Log File Format.

* Click on the Properties... button

* On the Extended Properties tab of that page that appears, make sure that the following items (at least) are selected: Time, Client IP Address, Method, URI Stem, URI Query, Protocol Status, Bytes Sent, Bytes Received, Time Taken and User Agent.

Having done that, you should access the website with the browser which is failing, and go through a session which reproduces the 404 problem.

The developer should then open the logfile, which will be the most recent-dated file in \Windows\System32\LogFiles\W3SVC1 and have a look at the requests (URI Stem item) that resulted in a Protocol Status of 404 (normal successful request is 200, 304 means the copy the browser already had in cache is up-to-date, etc).

I cannot reproduce getting a 404 error on the site; on either a Mac or a Windows PC running Safari 3.0.4, so I cannot help further apart from the above advice. That should definitely be enough for the developer to find out what the browser is requesting (it is logged as-is, so they should be able to see precisely what is wrong/missing/truncated with the request that is causing it to be for a page that the web server doesn't have, then track backwards from there).

tdorraugh Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 31, 2008 2:54 PM in response to tdorraugh

Thanks everyone!

The programmer seems to have figured it out... I still have to test it.

He said: "This is not a mac vs pc issue... it is an issue with how sites work that use ASP when the domain changes, the session changes.

The ACTIVITY viewer in Safari helped tremendously.

It is a session timeout issue from 2 different URL's being used to access the system.

look in that flow of pages... it starts with
PESCPEInteractive.com
and then changes to this
www.PESCPEInteractive.com

Which starts a new session (thus timing out the old one)

Your students should always use this URL:
www.PESCPEInteractive.com

and never without the www, since you have the www defined as the correct URL in the System environment panel.

I might be able to program the server to sense if it sees a URL coming in without the www and redirect to the site with the www automatically. "

Thanks for everything!
tdorraugh

TildeBee

Level 7

31,923 points

Jan 31, 2008 2:58 PM in response to tdorraugh

Wow, TD --

That is really great news.
A developer who will listen.
Very very nice work, all.

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Help In Resolving Safari Error