Hi!

I've been having a strange problem which I'm hoping
that someone can shed light upon...

I'm using libcurl within an app to fetch some data
from a specific HTTP host (www.steambird.com).

This generally works fine, on Linux and most Windows
machines. However, it seems that on ~100% of Windows2000
client machines (tested by users on several win2k machines
at several points on the internet) and a very small scattering
of other machines I get a CURLE_COULDNT_CONNECT.

This occurs with all of the various tried versions of libcurl
from CVS between 2004-12-08 and 2005-02-17 - I haven't tried
anything older. (Until February's CVS update, the error that
win2k saw was CURLE_OPERATION_TIMEOUTED, which judging from
the libcurl changelog was the incorrect error code.) I don't
personally have very good access to Windows2000 to track this down.

This is a pretty ordinary HTTP fetch using the MULTI
interface and basic authentication. All libcurl compiles
include C-ARES support, and I --disable all protocols except
vanilla HTTP support.

One of the things I thought of is that I'm using
curl_global_init(CURL_GLOBAL_ALL) which (since I'm also
initializing C-ARES independantly because I use C-ARES
for other non-libcurl purposes) could cause winsock to be
initialized twice which according to the libcurl docs can
be a bad thing. However, when I changed this so that libcurl
didn't init winsock, a tester reported no change in behaviour.

One of the other ideas I had was that perhaps Win2K accidentally
always sets one of the "standard" proxy environment variables for
completely unrelated purposes, but I haven't been able to verify
that yet. Seems a long shot.

Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance,
--Adam
Received on 2005-02-28