Last week I was trying to forward apache requests from my WAN address to my test server and coming up empty. This evening I had an opportunity to do a little debugging. It has been a while since I’ve needed to forward those and I’d rebuilt the server on the back end since. So when pages wouldn’t load from the WAN but were no problem from the LAN I figured it was a access issue on the router. With the router config verified I went to the apache error log and found the following:

[Wed Jun 02 17:35:59 2010] [debug] mod_deflate.c(615): [client x.x.x.x] Zlib: Compressed 45 to 38 : URL /index.html

I didn’t think apache would care about compressing/uncompressing the data it’s serving but that is what mod_deflate is for. I don’t need that feature, this is not a production situation and I’ll turn off the port forward in a few days. So I edited /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf and commented out what’s between the <IfModule> tag then restarted.

Problem solved !