Hello,

Some times ago I observed similar problems with other hosts and one of our
network experts had found an explanation for them. Unfortunately he is on
vacation in the moment, so I cannot ask him for the exact details.
My own vague remembrance is that it had something to do with a misconfigured
router or firewall in the neighbourhood of the problematic host. With the
current example www.cbs.com you can see that this host cannot be reached with
ping or traceroute, so obviously some low-level network filtering (ICMP Packets
?) is used somewhere. The side effect of this was that some automatic
adjustment of other TCP/IP parameters in connection with fragmented packets did
not work correctly and the end result was that the replies to the HTTP-Requests
never came back. I don't know if there is a workaround for this, may be someone
with deeper TCP/IP knowledge has further ideas.
Sorry, that I cannot be more precise, but nevertheless I thought I share this
experience with the list, before people do too much research at the curl end of
the problem.

Best regards,

Jochen Roderburg
ZAIK/RRZK
University of Cologne
Robert-Koch-Str. 10 Tel.: +49-221/478-7024
D-50931 Koeln E-Mail: Roderburg_at_rrz.Uni-Koeln.DE
Germany
Received on 2000-09-20