Files Downloading as HTML

[Nacus]

I am a real newbie, yet I am running a web site that has become somewhat popular fairly quickly. I was thinking that I would have time to learn, but I am in one trial by fire after another. We have Apache 2 running on a hosted 64 bit Suse Linux machine. Right now we are exepriencing something wierd. When some of our users try to download a file, they get HTML, not the correct file type. This does not happen with all users, as far as I can tell, and (in tests) is inconsistent from machine to machine. Everything worked fine for about 2-3 months. Then we implemented a set of PHP scripts for controlling password sharing and, boom, problems. I don't even know how to think about this! Could it be the scripts have caused the problem? If so, why does it not affect all of our users? If not the scripts, then what? All advice gladly taken. Thank you.

 

[smah]

There are several areas where this could be occurring. First, some browsers (and versions) are more tolerant of pages not being server properly. The web browser interprets the html code and other information and forms it into what is displayed on the screen. Despite the complaints that you might hear, in many respects, IE tends to be more tolerant of badly formed pages. So if there is something wrong with the page, or the way that it is be served, different browsers (and versions) can give different results. This could explain why not all users are seeing the problem.

You'll need to provide a link for anyone to analyze the problem. How are the users downloading these files and what types of files are they? This could be an encoding problem in the file itself or a mime type problem with the server configuration.