I have an asp.net application which is showing weird behavior deployed on a Windows 2008 production server. It uses forms authentication for login and after successful login it redirects to a home page. This site is working fine on all remote systems using IE, firefox and chrome as well. But when we try to access this site from a client machine over WAN on different network(client and server are using closed network over WAN), it works on Firefox and Chrome only. On Internet Explorer it gives "Internet Explorer cannot display the page".
I tried everything to identify the root cause by investigating application and system logs. Also tried tweaking with browser compatibility settings, tried to add it in Local Intranet and Trusted Sites security zone, updated internet explorer from 9 to 11, installed fiddler, but did not find any clue.
Finally I installed Wireshark on client side where IE was unable to display the site. Then after capturing traffic while using IE and Firefox both, we found that both sessions had [TCP Previous segment not captured][TCP segment of a reassembled PDU] and couple of DUP ACK messages. So, it seems like TCP segments are being dropped while retrieving POST request results for login page. Hence, there is an incomplete response received by client browser and it is unable to redirect to some other page. But this exactly same incomplete response is being received by both Firefox and IE, then I wonder how does Firefox manage to redirect it to next page and IE doesn't. Following is the sample of incomplete response being received:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Cache-Control: private, no-cache="Set-Cookie"
Content-Length: 8309
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Location: /ABC/Homepage.aspx
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Set-Cookie: .IAASPXAUTH=BD8291D32BD4FA64D541A5AA41F5BD84D35053F7DB65ECBEFEE163C9466F076E84FB21DFA4C655D2C8CA641B673B17B2C4FCD608F1310A3B1DD2DC85A96D1A0EED84B917FED0FBC6768A60564C7777D0326F5EA8786D32C296CF2542E0EC3FB0904151216F9AF1013DD2B6F299C7A0F3F9D8A7ED; path=/; HttpOnly
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2017 11:11:51 GMT
<html><head><title>Object moved</title></head><body>
<h2>Object moved to <a href="%2fABC%2fHomepage.aspx">here</a>.</h2>
</body></html>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional/`enter code here`/EN" >
<HTML>
.<HEAD>
..<title>Login</title>
..<meta content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1" name="GENERATOR">
..<meta content="C#" name="CODE_LANGUAGE">
..<meta content="JavaScript" name="vs_defaultClientScript">
..<meta content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5" name="vs_targetSchema">
..<script language="javascript" src="ISUtilities/IsCommonJs.js"></script>
..<LINK href="IsStyleSheet/StyleSheet1.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
..<script language="javascript">
.. // description :- function to set a user variable in session storage in order to prevent using multiple tab for same session.
.. // this sessionstorage is not accesible acr.
As you can see above the response being received is incomplete. Firefox manages to redirect to next page(Homepage.aspx) even with this response, but IE does not do so.
Can anyone help me explain why this difference in behavior is being encountered on the same client machine for two different browsers. and please suggest any measures to overcome this situation.
Thanks & Regards.