Intermittent 408 Errors In The Oracle iPlanet Web Server Access Logs (Doc ID 1448836.1)

Symptoms

On Oracle iPlanet Web Server 7.0u8 and older, an intermittent 408 Request Timeout error can be seen from any type of request to the web site. The problem is reproducible using any type of browser, whether SSL is enabled or not. Upon reproducing the problem, it appears that the full request does not get to the web server due to a timeout being hit where the request is truncated with a 408 error.

On Oracle iPlanet Web Server 7.0u9 or newer, the problem is not observed and the request timeout is 30 seconds between subsequent requests, while in WS7.0u8, the timeout appears to not reset during a subsequent request, making the problem easier to exploit.

Example access logs shows the 408 response code and the HTTP method, URI and HTTP version being truncated or missing:

Changes

Cause

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