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Hi guys

I have a client reporting a problem with the control panel in IE with a proxy server enabled. It seems intermittent but when they save entries, they are directed back to the control panel home page rather than the screen that confirms the entry was created or edited.

Do you know of any use cases that would produce this behaviour? For example a script file failing to load or some form data not being submitted in the entry form?

What’s strange is that they are not seeing the problem in Chrome with the same proxy enabled so I can only assume it’s something to do with client-side script files but as I’m not able to reproduce on our own (Mac) network, I can’t really debug.

Thanks

Just to update this, the client is now reporting the same behaviour in Chrome, so it appears not to be confined to IE as previously thought.

Hey Russ Back,

Thank you for your question.

Does the issue go away if you remove the Proxy server from the equation?

The Proxy server is most likely the issue.

Please let me know.

Cheers,

It does indeed appear to. However we’re trying to work out what might be causing it. For example is there a specific scenario in which EE would just redirect to the CP home page before saving an entry? A field value not being set, or a querystring value not being set, something along those lines.

From a security and network perspective we can’t just tell the corporate client to turn off the proxy just for EE as it’s not something they have problems with with other systems, so we really need to try and work out what can be changed on the proxy server to cure the issue, the starting point being trying to understand under what circumstances EE would behave that way.

Hey Russ,

I understand fully. There is a lot that can be done in the configuration of the Proxy server which is why it’s difficult for me to troubleshoot networking outside of ExpressionEngine. I can really only offer you support of ExpressionEngine.

That being said, I went to one of our Engineers and asked for some ideas to give your Network Admin.

It could have something to do with the GET data being stripped from the request, so the CP will just route you back to the home screen, or something close to that. Our Engineer is not sure why it would do this with just the publish form and no other form, like the login form. It could be a security issue with the proxy server. You might check those settings.

A good way to debug this might be to put some sort of tracer statement in entry_form() in content_publish.php to see if the POST request is even being routed properly to that function. If not, put more tracer statements around the code to see where things get lost.

Hopefully this gives you a great starting point for troubleshooting why the Proxy server is causing this odd behavior.

A few more thoughts, in the ExpressionEngine Control Panel

Admin->Security and Privacy->Security and Session Preferences

Process form data in Secure Mode? to no.

Require IP Address and User Agent for Login? to no.

Thanks,

You are not alone Russ. We have a client with a proxy server experiencing exactly the same intermittent issue.

It developed about a week ago, without any web server or application changes, so the evidence suggests some sort of update or policy change on the proxy.

My client is experiencing the issue not only when posting entries, but also when registering members and logging in to CP.

I’ve relaxed the security and session settings as suggested by Shane, and also made control panel sessions Cookie Only. We await the results.

Hey Big Cub,

Thanks for chiming in. And welcome to the forums!

Hopefully those changes will help.

Cheers,

Thanks guys, will pass this onto the client’s IT team to see if improvements can be made.

Hi Russ,

Sounds good!

Cheers,