Re: can not create a PR with gnatsweb, send-pr,edit-pr works

[Yngve Svendsen]

At 19:42 04.12.2002 +0000, Stefan Hegger wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I installed gnats-4 beta 2 and gnatsweb. Gnats seems to work fine but
> gnatsweb does not work very well. I can not create or edit a PR. I get
> only the information connecting the server and after a timeout the
> following message
>
> Bad Request
>
> Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
>
> even when I add debug=3Dall I can't see anything. I'm allowed to edit
> PR's. Could someone give me a hint?
>
> Stefan

This is an error message coming from the web server itself. It means that 
as part of the HTTP request that the browser sent to the server for the 
gnatsweb.pl script, it sent some header which the server is unable to 
understand or process. Thus, it is not really Gnatsweb or GNATS which is 
the problem since the request never even reaches Gnatsweb.

(There might be a line below the error message, giving a slightly more 
detailed description of the problem)

We have seen something like this before when users have tried to store 
enormously complicated queries from the Gnatsweb query results page. Such 
queries are stored in a cookie in the user's browser, and very complicated 
queries produce very long cookies. Now, with each call or request that the 
browser sends to Gnatsweb via the web server, cookies stored by Gnatsweb 
are included, even for requests that have nothing to do with queries. The 
problem arises if the web server has a fixed limit for how large requests 
to the server can be (the main reason for such limits are to prevent the 
possibility of using oversized requests in denial of service attacks 
against the web server). Apache typically has this set to 8kB.

You can find more about this in the TROUBLESHOOTING document that comes 
with Gnatsweb. Basically, I recommend that you delete possibly offending 
cookies or try a different browser. You may also be able to see in more 
detail from the web server logs what the problem really is.

Yngve Svendsen
Gnatsweb maintainer