Wow! Looks as if there is a bug in the web interface that you are using.
The ampersand and last parameter label (for lang=it-IT) appear to have
been converted into a weird UNICODE "character".
FWIW the three characters I am seeing in its place (and their
equivalent helps in CharMap, Characterset Windows: Western) are:
â U+00E2 Latin Small Letter A With Circumflex
ΠU+0152 (0x8C) Latin Capital Ligature Oe
© U+00A9 Copyright Sign
(We may be able to take the bitstring implied by those concatenated
hex values to figure out the real Unicode character might be
to get some better clue about why it is happening.)
What do you see when you are looking at that link, one "character"
or three? Also what shows in the Status bar when you give the link focus?
More importantly, is that the link you were using or was it formatted correctly?
(It was after all just a repeat of the link that you had originally posted.)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie...wser&mid=9448ef1a-debb-4760-8666-a17f57f2a310
Hmm... I just checked the web interface copy of *my* post
and the link in it looks Ok. At the same time I checked the copy
of the link in yours and as expected I saw a single character
(a box character, implying that whatever that bitstring represents
is not a character in the characterset that I have.)
I think that the only thing that may concern you in all of this
is to watch for that problem if ever you are needing to use
links posted by someone using the web interface which contain
parameters called lang=. Bizarre!
When I read your reply I copied the link in order to answer to your question
and the window described by you below suddenly appeared. So I could download
the file. But I didn't memorised the name of the site. Then I tried again to
copy the link on the IE bar and this other window appeared (when I say
"doesn't work" it means that this window appears):
window appears with "world" icon on the left and the folder on the right and
a white page flying from the "world" to the "folder"
The window title is "File Download" (I've got the italian version of IE so I
have to translate and the words won't be exactly the same as you will see on
your IE)
"search of file information"
"firefox setup 1.0.exe from mozilla.mirrors.tds.net"
The status bar all with with no progress
Time left: "blank"
download in: "blank"
Speed of download: "blank"
check box named "close window after donload"
three button "open" "open folder" "cancel". The first two button are not
active
after some minutes this window is open, an error window appears:
Title "Microsoft Internet Explorer"
Impossible to download firefox setup 1.0.exe from mozilla.mirrors.tds.net
Impossible to open the internet site. Site not available or not found. Try
later
Botton "OK"
At this time I couldn't download the file
Excellent description! Thank you. That is much clearer now
than "doesn't work" was. In summary, then, it looks as if you
are seeing the download dialog that you would have seen if you
had first seen the download prompt (which I described) and
actually requested something with it?
I'm not sure what that would imply. I would prefer to see a packet
trace of it happening but I think one explanation might be that the
server is at fault. It might even be the case that there is a caching
server somewhere in the path which is responding incorrectly instead.
(There shouldn't be any caching because the download request
is essentially a query but who knows?)
Then I tryed again and again and I began to understand that it depens on the
mirror choosen.
I did not make any choice of the mirror. The mirror is apparently choosen
casually
Here I report a statistic of different mirrors found each trial:
....
Again, I think the best way of differentiating the two cases
and understanding the behaviour of the bad ones would be
to look at some traces and compare them.
I just only wanted to show you another case where the download works
I have had this download problem with .exe files since several months. And I
reported here some examples.
Ok. Sounds like you are getting a better understanding of the symptom.
It's unfortunate that you can't retry an individual mirror site reliably.
Getting a trace might help find a way to do that too.
Then you could see if toggling Passive mode FTP was the key
to making a "bad site" work better.
OTOH just toggling Passive mode and picking a random mirror
automatically could have these possible effects on your observations:
1. no change
2. complete reversal (e.g. ones which "worked" then don't)
3. partial reversal for the worse
4. major improvement
5. all downloads completely reliable
....
Where may I change the settings of the FTP client as suggested by you?
In the Options, Advanced tab, Browsing section. The one controlling
Passive FTP is near the bottom of that section.
Good luck
Robert
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