Help! Website suddenly messed up internally, but not externally.

[Garacesh]

In the process of building a new website, and everything has been going fine (at least as best it can) up until recently. If you go to the site now (by IP address) from inside our network the page loads incredibly slowly and, when it eventually does, it's malformed. Formatting isn't displayed, there's no background or layout images, it's text-only. Links are there and working. The text contents are working. The site title is correct.

 

Here's where things get tricky. You can get to it from the outside world by using a subdomain of our primary website and if you do that, everything is rendered correctly. Also, if I log on to the server in question, IIS is running properly (I've rebooted the VM and restarted IIS just to be sure) and the website is rendered correctly if you navigate to http://localhost/

 

'Bypass proxy server for local addresses' is set, and an exception is set for the specific address (also tried http://10.114.* but no difference) however Smoothwall is still showing my traffic to the resolved DNS address (I put in 10.114, Smoothwall says I'm trying to go to dev.address), so could this be a DNS issue? If I tell Windows to not use any proxy server at all, it works.

 

I've tried ipconfig /flushdns - no change.

I've tried tracert, it shows 1 hop to the core switch and then 1 hop to the server internally. Doesn't touch the proxy, but yet if I set the proxy, Smoothwall is logging me trying to get to it's external DNS address when I use the web browser.

 

Tearing hair out here, and I like my hair

[cpjitservices]

Are you using Google Chrome and have you cleared Browser Cache ?

[Garacesh]

Testing with all 3 'main' browsers. Chrome is my default browser, the rest of the school (non-admins) are forced to use IE though

 

*facepalm* Is it really that simple? Cleared the browsing data, all works fine now*. Damnit I don't half jump straight to the complicated solutions first

 

*From IE anyhow. Chrome doesn't really like browsing across vlans (I get this issue a lot when trying to remotely administrate printers)

 

Edit: was not that simple.

Edited February 27, 2015 by Garacesh

[Garacesh]

Double-post

 

Didn't work.

 

It worked once. Once. In IE. Went to the web designer's machine, cleared cache (Chrome, IE, Firefox).. It worked in IE, but not Firefox or Chrome. It then stopped working in IE. Came back to my machine, refreshed, not working again. Page is back to it's borked format. Still works fine if I drop off the proxy entirely.

[halbaradkenafin]

A few things to check:

 

All links are relative rather than static, if it's being developed in something like Dreamweaver the sometimes it decides to just magically put in a static link rather than relative.

Browse to the site using it's internal server name rather than IP, could be hitting smoothwall and being blocked for some reason

nslookup for the IP should hopefully show the internal name for the server

 

Without getting a look at the code/site it's just some guesses.

[Garacesh]

All links are relative rather than static, if it's being developed in something like Dreamweaver the sometimes it decides to just magically put in a static link rather than relative - Edit: Sorry, misunderstood 'Links', my bad. All links (such as the images for the layout) are static pointing at our dev.address address. You're right, it could be that..

Browse to the site using it's internal server name rather than IP, could be hitting smoothwall and being blocked for some reason - No difference

nslookup for the IP should hopefully show the internal name for the server - Returns our DNS, then the webserver. Names and IP addresses are correct.

Edited February 27, 2015 by Garacesh

[Garacesh]

Right, okay, Smoothwall has had an explicit allow for dev.address and that's fixed it.. But only for Internet Explorer.. Chrome and Firefox are still failing miserably even after clearing the cache again. Chrome is giving the malformed page, and Firefox is going upstream for some reason (the upstream LA proxy is returning (111) Connection refused)

[TechMonkey]

All links (such as the images for the layout) are static pointing at our dev.address address. You're right, it could be that..

 

I would take a guess that is the issue. It would stop images being found and any extra files, like CSS or JS, so you would get a very minimal site. Links should nearly always be relative to prevent things like this.

You could test this theory by opening the site that looks correct and then follow this post to disable CSS. If this then resembles the broken site you know it is that and can start fixing it.

[Opendium_Steve]

Install Firefox's Firebug plugin, go it its "Net" tab and reload the page - you should be able to spot any objects that are failing to load.

[Garacesh]

Thanks @SteveHill but we've decided to host it externally now so everything is sorted.