Help! Download Product Not Working With IE 8?

[DrByte]

However I do know that downloads work as my product worked fine up until a few days ago. I don't know what changed to cause the current problem.

Well, it can only be one of two things:
a) you, or someone, changed something in your store settings and/or PHP files
b) your hosting company changed their server configuration.

In the case of (a) I suspect you're going to say "you" didn't change *anything*. So, let's assume that's correct. What about *anyone* else? Someone else who has access to your site/server? Or your hosting company? Or a hacker? Compare everything on your server against a good known working backup, and resolve any differences you find. Take it a step further and compare your database backup against a fresh copy of your database, looking for any changes to configuration settings, product/attribute details, etc (naturally new customers/orders are to be expected). Prove to yourself that nothing rogue is going on and prove that the claim of "nobody has changed anything" is accurate.

In the case of (b) you'll have to work with your hosting company to sort that out. It's not uncommon for them to deny changes, largely because that's their safest first answer. But it's often also not completely true, as many hosting companies have many employees doing things others don't know about. Report your symptoms including start date and how long things worked fine without problems. Maybe you'll end up talking with someone who will take you seriously and check logs etc for verification.

Download problems can often be attributed to server configuration changes, compression alterations, PHP upgrades, MIME changes, and a host of other issues managed on the server side.

And IE8 is awful on so many fronts that it's very hard to tell whether it's just a browser issue. Granted, you have suggested maybe firefox is doing the same for you.

My next step is to just remove the product from the catalog and then try setting up again.

That's almost certainly not going to make any difference in download performance, and will result in losing your search-engine ranking for that product since it will no longer exist under the same URL as it's been indexed for already. No point removing it unless you're absolutely certain that it's necessary, and I see nothing indicating such need.

[DrByte]

I'm using Zencart 1.38. I created a downloadable product about 2 months ago and it's worked fine until recently. But in the past week or so, downloads have quit working with Internet Explorer and Firefox. However they still work with Opera 10.

...

So is this a bug? Or do I have something misconfigured in my Zencart installation?

I don't see how it qualifies as a bug with Zen Cart if it was working just fine for 2 months

I originally posted about my trouble here

Your duplicate threads have been merged for continuity sake.

[imacamper]

How do you have this setup and what type of server are you on and details?
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/i...hp?article=292

Thank you for your reply.

My site is hosted on a shared server. I'm fairly certain the server OS is RedHat Linux. I know it's some sort of *nix server.

My Zencart installation is in /store.

Regarding the link you posted, I checked and have things set to download via redirect. Streaming is false.

I did try switching redirect to "false" and tried again. This time only about 10 packets were exchanged and the transfer ended with the client sending 4 RSTs.

I also tried setting streaming to "true" but same as above.

I set everything back to its original state, and tried downloading again. Now it's interesting that the download terminates not with the ZeroWindow packets I saw yesterday but with the same RSTs I experienced above.

Thanks again for looking at this.

Drew

[Vger]

Downloads are a minefield - not so much from a programme point of view but server setup and browser. Various factors are:

1. Whether your server is a 32 bit system or a 64 bit system.
2. What sort of control panel it uses and what security it has.
3. Which browser you use (IE 6 will only handle up to 2 Gbs, IE 7 up to 4 Gbs, Firefox up to any level, Safari same as IE, don't know about IE 8).

For "Download by redirect" to work the programme must be able to create a temp file "on the fly", which many servers will not allow. If you use RHEL with the Ensim Pro control panel, for instance, you cannot use that setting. If you use RHEL with cPanel you should be able to use it.

In all cases once the download begins it is passed off to Apache, with its session id, for Apache to handle it.

If your hosts installed Suhosin (which encrypts session data) on top of SuExec or SuPHP that may well be the cause of your problem, but you should be able to see if that is installed by looking at tools --> Server Info.

Like I said, downloadable products are a minefield to navigate, there are so many variables involved.

Vger

[imacamper]

Thank you for your detailed reply.

Well, it can only be one of two things:
a) you, or someone, changed something in your store settings and/or PHP files
b) your hosting company changed their server configuration.

In the case of (a) I suspect you're going to say "you" didn't change *anything*. So, let's assume that's correct. What about *anyone* else? Someone else who has access to your site/server? Or your hosting company? Or a hacker?

It is possible "I" changed something unintentionally. One thing I have done recently is update my product catalog although I've done that several times before without problem. I use Easy Populate to load a CSV file I get from my supplier. It always appears to update existing products and add new ones but I guess there could be more going on behind the scenes.

No one else is supposed to have access to my site. Although it's possible I could be the victim of a hacker, it seems a hacker would not target messing with a download I give away for free. More likely that my hosting company may have changed something.

Compare everything on your server against a good known working backup, and resolve any differences you find. Take it a step further and compare your database backup against a fresh copy of your database, looking for any changes to configuration settings, product/attribute details, etc (naturally new customers/orders are to be expected). Prove to yourself that nothing rogue is going on and prove that the claim of "nobody has changed anything" is accurate.

I did try to install this PHP debug script (http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=860) but never found any output in ./cache as documentation said. I don't know if that's because there are no errors or because I missed some step.

In the case of (b) you'll have to work with your hosting company to sort that out. It's not uncommon for them to deny changes, largely because that's their safest first answer. But it's often also not completely true, as many hosting companies have many employees doing things others don't know about. Report your symptoms including start date and how long things worked fine without problems. Maybe you'll end up talking with someone who will take you seriously and check logs etc for verification.

Download problems can often be attributed to server configuration changes, compression alterations, PHP upgrades, MIME changes, and a host of other issues managed on the server side.

Based upon past experience, it would likely be far easier to change hosting. This is why I've always preferred to run my own server but I don't do enough business to justify the expense of either co-hosting or getting business class bandwidth speeds to my home.

And IE8 is awful on so many fronts that it's very hard to tell whether it's just a browser issue. Granted, you have suggested maybe firefox is doing the same for you.

Yes, but unfortunately it's so popular that having a web site that doesn't work with it is not good for business.

That's almost certainly not going to make any difference in download performance, and will result in losing your search-engine ranking for that product since it will no longer exist under the same URL as it's been indexed for already. No point removing it unless you're absolutely certain that it's necessary, and I see nothing indicating such need.

Thanks for that advice. Instead of this, I actually created a "new" downloadable product for the same file to test. And like you thought, this did not make any difference.

Thank you for your time. I guess I was just hoping that there might be some easy fix for this symptom. If my download never worked, then I'd suspect my configuration or web host. But since downloads work with some browsers but not others, then I suspect my Zencart config is correct.

Cheers,

Drew

[imacamper]

Downloads are a minefield - not so much from a programme point of view but server setup and browser. Various factors are:

1. Whether your server is a 32 bit system or a 64 bit system.
2. What sort of control panel it uses and what security it has.
3. Which browser you use (IE 6 will only handle up to 2 Gbs, IE 7 up to 4 Gbs, Firefox up to any level, Safari same as IE, don't know about IE 8).

For "Download by redirect" to work the programme must be able to create a temp file "on the fly", which many servers will not allow. If you use RHEL with the Ensim Pro control panel, for instance, you cannot use that setting. If you use RHEL with cPanel you should be able to use it.

In all cases once the download begins it is passed off to Apache, with its session id, for Apache to handle it.

If your hosts installed Suhosin (which encrypts session data) on top of SuExec or SuPHP that may well be the cause of your problem, but you should be able to see if that is installed by looking at tools --> Server Info.

Like I said, downloadable products are a minefield to navigate, there are so many variables involved.

Vger

Thanks for your reply. Because my Zencart installation is on a hosted server, I don't know the specifics. My host does use cPanel and the download does work with Opera 10.10. Failures are with Firefox 3.5.7 & IE 8.0.7600 that I can test personally. I also had a customer tell me of trouble with Safari 4.x. I don't know about other browsers.

Here's the text I get from checking Admin -> Tools -> Server Info:

---BEGIN---
Server Host: alchemistswarehouse.com (12.97.188.109)

Database Host: localhost (127.0.0.1)
Server OS:

Database: MySQL 5.0.81-community-log

Server Date: 01/30/2010 13:46:45

Database Date: 01/30/2010 13:46:45

HTTP Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635

PHP Version: 5.2.11 (Zend: 2.2.0)

PHP Memory Limit: 64M

PHP Safe Mode: Off

PHP File Uploads: On

Max Size: 16M

POST Max Size: 8M

Database Data Size: 13,057 kB

Database Index Size: 3,195 kB

Zen Cart 1.3.8a
Database Patch Level: 1.3.8
v1.3.8 [2009-11-10 11:26:16] (Fresh Installation)
---END---

The downloadable file is simply a 580K PDF file.

Thanks,

Drew

[imacamper]

It appears I have solved my problem.

Based upon the info in this post (http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=116533), I tried turning off GZip compression. I do vaguely recall turning it on after reading some tutorial somewhere that suggested it was a good idea but that was quite a while ago. Maybe my web host changed something that made that no longer a valid setting?

Anyway, I can now download in both IE8 and Firefox 3.5.7. Does anyone have any explanation for this behavior?

Thanks to all for your help so far!!!

Drew

[Vger]

I have posted several times in this forum about the inadvisability of turning on gZip compression. Ever since PHP 5+ came out there have been problems with gZip working with Red Hat Enterprise linux servers, especially if they use the Ensim Pro control panel.

Vger

[zollster]

check you dont have a .htaccess file in the pub folder... i took that out and it solved my problem. although more than likely it caused some more problems i haven't found yet

[DrByte]

What did you have *in* the .htaccess file that you removed?