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Hello all,

I've just this afternoon set up Hiawatha because it appeared to be everything I was looking for in a web server. It's fast. It's secure. It's full featured. It served all my little test files like a dream.

Unfortunately, I've run into a bit of a snag. When I try to have Hiawatha serve larger files it fails miserably. I'll type up a 2 to 3 hundred line HTML file and drop it on my Hiawatha server on my Ubuntu box and go over to my windows box to view it and it just sits there loading the page forever. It doesn't even time out. I've left it for 20 minutes plus and nothing EVER happens. I know the basic set up is correct because as I said I can view little files I put on the server just fine. I've verified the file is there and it's a correctly formatted html file. I even created a new html file to make sure I could reproduce the problem. The new file just says "Maybe it's incapable of serving big files?" on about 200 lines. No fancy formatting. No lists or anything weird like that. I've checked my access logs and my error logs. The error logs are empty. The access logs show all the requests but nothing seems out of the ordinary. I even thought maybe it was my browser so I've tried it with IE, Firefox, and Opera with the same results on each. Is anyone else having this problem? The web page is created with IceApe (a re-labeled seamonkey) and seems pretty vanilla HTML to me when I look at the source. I've checked the file permissions to make sure it looked the same as all the other files I can retrieve from my server and it does.

I'm at a loss for what to try next here. Someone PLEASE help!

Eric Evans
ciresnave@yahoo.com

Alright.. I thought maybe it was a problem with the interpretation of the html in the browsers or maybe that it was sending a partial file and stopping part way through so I tried pulling down one of the files with wget but had no luck.. It never sends any of it.. Here's what happened:

$ wget http://k7hkl.webhop.net/test2.html
--19:26:38-- http://k7hkl.webhop.net/test2.html
=> `test2.html'
Resolving k7hkl.webhop.net... 71.36.20.176
Connecting to k7hkl.webhop.net|71.36.20.176|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 7,480 (7.3K) [text/html]

0% [ ] 0 --.--K/s



...and that's where it sat indefinitely. <sigh> This is very frustrating and I'm sure I'm doing something obviously wrong here. Hopefully one of you wonderful people will point out my stupid mistake..

Eric Evans
ciresnave@yahoo.com

Hiawatha is perfectly capable of serving large files. I've tested it with files of hundreds of megabytes. How did you install Hiawatha? Did you use the .deb file or did you compile it yourself?

I've tested the URL you posted in your second message, but I was able to download the file.

# wget http://k7hkl.webhop.net/test2.html
--07:53:44--  http://k7hkl.webhop.net/test2.html
           => `test2.html'
Resolving k7hkl.webhop.net... 71.36.20.176
Connecting to k7hkl.webhop.net|71.36.20.176|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 7,480 (7.3K) [text/html]

100%[========================================================>] 7,480         19.80K/s

07:53:48 (19.76 KB/s) - `test2.html' saved [7480/7480]

Wow.. Okay.. After you (and another friend) telling me that they could retrieve these larger files via the internet I was more than a little bit bewildered by the whole thing and insanely curious to see what was actually going back and forth across my network for data. I pulled up a sniffer and lo and behold it was a fractured packet issue. I lowered the MTU size on my server system and now everything appears to be working fine. I have no clue WHY this problem existed but this does seem to have solved it. All involved MTUs were originally set to 1500 and it's still fracturing packets but now it's not complaining about it and the data's getting through. I can't say I understand it but it works. Thanks for the help.

- Eric