Diplaying PDF document

My links are displaying a blank screen

[justa]

I have a problem.
I noticed yesterday morning that some links to PDF files display blank pages rather then the document.

I'm running Apache 1.3.22 on a windows NT server, and I haven't made notable changes to the server in the past few days.

Everything was working fine on all machines on Friday, but when I showed up monday morning the phone calls started rolling in.

When you click on the link the address changes from www.mysite.com --> www.mysite.com/mypdf.pdf and "done" comes up on the status bar. There is still a hour glass on the cursor when I move it to the menu area, and a little while later it stops displaying just a blank page.

I've "Save Target As" and opened the file on my desktop, I've gone File ¦ Open in IE, browsed the file on the server and been able to open it, opened another PDF from another server, reinstalled Acrobat Reader, I have changed the security settings in the browser (everyone is using IE5.5 or IE6) enabling all activeX controls, and made sure the file isn't too big or contain more then 256 characters (which shouldn't be an issue after ie5.5)

I have had a look on the Adobe & Apache site, and done numerous Google's to find an answer but come up nip, nada, nothin'.

Anyone had this problem before, or know of a solution?

[Brett_Tabke]

- reboot.
- run a header viewer (like proxomitron) and look at what headers the server is sending out.
- Double check your mime.type file (in the conf directory). Load it in an editor and see if it looks ok.
- study the log file and see if there are any errors.
- go into your conf file and enable debug logging.
- double check the files/diretories that the pdfs are in.
- run scan disk to make sure there isn't a glitch somewhere in the file system.

[justa]

I've run Proxomitron on my PC and with a few little twitches have it displaying some information in the message log. The good news is that when I run Proxomitron the PDF's are displayed without any problems. Unfortunately I don't really know what the message log is trying to tell me.

Seeing as we are frowning away from posting code I won't post the message log out, however does anyone know exactly what to look for?

[justa]

I thought I'd bump the post up again as I have found what the problem is, but I still can't seem to find a solution.

The problem came about when I added custom error pages to the .htaccess page so that it read

AuthType NTLM
NTLMAuth On
NTLMAuthoritative On
NTLMOfferBasic Off
NTLMBasicPreferred Off
NTLMDomain pwdjp_hub

require valid-user

ErrorDocument 401 /errors/401.htm
ErrorDocument 403 /errors/403.htm
ErrorDocument 404 /errors/404.htm

The error pages displayed fine but the PDF's would only load a blank page in the browser. I removed the custom pages from this file and created a new .htaccess file in the Server root directory. Again, the custom pages worked fine but the PDF's would not load. I then added
AddType application/pdf .pdf
to the second .htaccess page but the problem still persisted.

Is there something really obvious I'm missing here?