BT Home hub HTTPI broken

For serveral weeks now we have noticed problems with blogger and large posts.

The symptoms were as follows:

• On large posts there would be failure to sucessfully save or publish and instead giving an empty web page.
• Trim the post a bit and things would work.
• Post from another ISP and no problem.

Tonight I had a look at the HTTP headers involved in a blogger post and it looks like the entire post is placed in a cookie for the AJAX auto save functionality. Blogger uses several cookies. Together these are long and sent as a single HTTP header which led me to believe some some buffer length is being exceeded.

Sure enough I checked to the logs of my BT Home Hub and the HTTPI module is reporting

[HTTPI] (error) HTTP header does not fit buffer ?!

HTTPI is a small, light weight perl HTTP server. I turned on url filtering on the BT Hub a few weeks ago and it appears to require this module to intercept each web request. Disabling this service and problem is solved.

If you have a BT Home Hub you can get detailed logs as follows

telnet to 192.168.1.254
user: admin
password: admin (unless you have changed it)

Cntrl-Q

URLfiltering is under menu -> dsd (also using the command line)

As a bonus I added my USB memory stick to the USB slot of the hub and am now listening to "Modest Mouse". The Linux 2.6.8 kernel on the device includes support for USB mass storage and USB printers :-)