[users@httpd] Mozilla Rendering Problem after PHP Error

[John Riley <jriley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As of a week ago, I had a working installation of PHP based forum 
running as a virtual host on an Apache 2.0.50/Mandrake 10.1 system.  I 
was happily using the Mozilla 1.7.2 browser to access the site.   I 
edited one of the theme files for the forum and forgot to close a quote 
in the PHP code; this of course gave an error, but after fixing that, 
the site does not render properly in Mozilla.  View Source in Mozilla 
gives only:  html - body - /body - /html tags; there is no other content 
(though the full page does get served).

The failure is noticed for both Mozilla Suite 1.7.2 and 1.7.8 (on Linux) 
and Firefox 1.0.4 (on Windows), but the site is fine in Konqueror, lynx 
and Internet Explorer.  I've done numerous Google searches, searched 
Mozilla and Apache Bug lists and mailing lists and have not found 
anything that fits.

I created a dummy site on another Mandrake 10.1 box and it works fine 
with Mozilla 1.7.8. After deleting the document root directory and the 
backend MySQL database from the server, the forum PHP files were 
reinstalled from the original tar file and db restored from the 
mysqldump file (the copied sited on the other box used the same forum 
tar and mysqldump).  Mozilla continued to fail for pages served from the 
problematic server, though it works fine from the 'dummy' site.

Mozilla works fine for other virtual hosts on the problematic machine.

The Apache rpm's were uninstalled and reinstalled and then upgraded to 
the 2.0.50-7.6.101 Mandrake rpm.

With ethereal and looking at the apache logs, I was able to verify that 
apache is sending approximately 23,000 bytes to Mozilla.  I also 
verified that Mozilla could render the transferred html data in two ways.

(1)   saved the page from Konqueror, then opened the file in Mozilla and
(2)   pieced together the data from an ethereal capture of Mozilla's GET 
request to an html file, then opened in Moz.

Believing the html data to be ok, though Mozilla was dropping it, I 
began looking at the headers (maybe I should have started here) and 
using lynx --head --dump $url, got the results listed below.   The 
problematic 'host' has several headers not seen on the others:

The Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Several headers, such as Set-Cookie and Pragma: no-cache, appear twice.

$url = http://www.scdeerhunter.com (this is the url that causes the 
failure in Mozilla and is a public url if you'd like to test it)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:31:30 GMT
Server: Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/2.0.50 (Mandrakelinux/7.6.101mdk) 
mod_per
l/1.99_16 Perl/v5.8.5 mod_ssl/2.0.50 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PHP/4.3.8
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=be3eae65a7e671c53ccb7197777174d4; path=/
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=f4e8956ed8c127577c574878f5dc3eae; path=/
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:31:31 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

$url=http://caromel/scdeerhunter/index.php  (same server, just using 
default host/path rather than virtual host)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 05:47:37 GMT
Server: Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/2.0.50 (Mandrakelinux/7.6.101mdk) 
mod_per
l/1.99_16 Perl/v5.8.5 mod_ssl/2.0.50 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PHP/4.3.8
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=fd439fe816a46b1ddca6ae68d885cd2f; path=/
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 05:47:38 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

$url=http://smf  (this is 'dummy' site on another box)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:42:43 GMT
Server: Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/2.0.50 (Mandrakelinux/7.6.101mdk) 
mod_per
l/1.99_16 Perl/v5.8.5 mod_ssl/2.0.50 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PHP/4.3.8
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=b593c5ae8103861a0879c7801c8ffe40; path=/
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:42:43 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

What could I have done to the server installation by having that open 
quote in PHP? Perhaps a library apache uses got corrupted (like a buffer 
overflow)?

Thanks for any advice or suggestions; I've been banging against this 
issue for nearly a week.


--
John S. Riley, Ph.D.
DSB Scientific Consulting
http://www.dsbscience.com 


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