How to make Safari work behind a SonicWALL firewall
Do you have a Mac behind a SonicWALL firewall? Do you find that some URLs (like certain pages at the New York Times) won’t load in Safari, but they work in Firefox? Is the problem worse when you’re behind a secondary router, such as a wireless router?
If so, Edward Marczak of Tech Zendo has the solution for you.
The basic solution is to access the SonicWALL’s hidden diagnostics page at http://your.ip.address/diag.html and turn off the checkbox that says “Enforce Host Tag Search for CFS”.
It turns out the SonicWALL drops some web connections where the HTTP request headers are split across multiple packets. It does this to make it harder to bypass content filtering, but it can cause Safari’s legitimate traffic to be dropped.
Thanks Edward!
Followup: 2007-10-10
This support document from SonicWALL explains the problem in more detail. WebKit (Safari) is waiting for a TCP ACK before sending out the next packet; apparently it is not supposed to do that.
Technorati Tags: mac, networking, safari, sonicwall
