Problem

I had been working on updating one of my servers to Linux when I came Across a strange bug when using a certain script.

Apparently in Internet Explorer 6 GZip does not work, this is what compresses pages to make them load faster.

The result of this bug was that about half or the items in my script would not load and they returned blank pages.

Solution

After much research I found that the bug was in the mod_deflate module of apache.

First I had to go edit the file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf

Once there I replaced the current content with the following

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.[0678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE\s7Â !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
</IfModule>

Then all I needed to do was restart Apache (“sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart“) and it was fixed.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript
	  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
	  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.[0678] no-gzip
	  BrowserMatch \bMSIE\s7Â !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
</IfModule>