"system (" in any textarea hangs php/apache ? [RESOLVED]

[Vineet Bansal <vineetbansal@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks all for your input.

Nothing was getting logged into our servers in case of timeouts and eventually it did turn out to be an external problem. The issue here was that our university's boundary intrusion detection system parses GET and POST variables and anything akin to "system (" or "eval (" is taken as an attempt to a function call and its not let through.

Thanks all,
Vineet

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 7:44 AM, lists-php wrote:

I realized that this wasn't specific to the 404, but looking at
what's happening there would get most other things out of the way.

If this only happens for connections from outside the network,
what's between the external user and these machines? Is there a
reverse proxy server or something else along those lines? apache and
php don't know what's inside vs. outside your network. apache may be
configured to listen on a specific ipnumber (if the machine has
multiple) and will have ipnumbers in some virtual host setups (e.g.,
ssl, where name-based virtual hosting doesn't work), but doesn't
know anything about your network beyond that. php doesn't even know
that much. so, if this only happens for external users, I'd suspect
that something else (likely external to these machines) is doing
something.

I'll assume you have been watching the access/error logs on these
machines to see what's getting to them and from where.