I hate it when my friends let me down

My good friends let me down today. They wasted my time with their silly problems. I really like Apache and Firefox and Ajax...but they had some obscure issues today that are causing me to break commitments. It took some seriously Google searching to uncover the root cause.

I was trying to make an Ajax request (using Prototype and link_to_remote) from Firefox to a JRuby on Rails application running in Tomcat over an https connection proxied by Apache Web Server. That's a lot of pieces that could go wrong. I was getting page not found in my poor little div. The link was being generated correctly and I could navigate to it.

Everything worked fine on my box. Of course, the problem was on the real server. Which is still in dev mode and hasn't been opened up so that I can connect to it from my desktop. Which means I have to open an X session to the server over ssh to launch a browser. Which doesn't have Firebug. Double check everything else. Have to find Firebug and get into the back end network...time passes...

Firebug said it was a 403.

It turns out Firefox doesn't pass the content-length header on POST requests. It turns out the sysadmin had typed the innocent looking phrase SecFilterEngine On into the Apache config. This causes Apache to reject requests without a content length header on POST requests. So secure I can't connect. I guess Firefox should send that header, but should Apache really demand it? Now I have a hell of a lot of working around this to do. To the casual observer / tester / customer - it's a bug, a defect, something wrong with my code. I should, and I wish I could, have a dev environment that even remotely resembled production. Amazing waste of a day. What's going to happen tomorrow?

Details here...