[Xen-users] GPLPV signed network drivers cause TCP connection resets on some HTTPS endpoints on Windows Server 2012 R2 guest

[Mehdi El Gueddari <mehdi@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Config:

- 64-bit Ubuntu 13.10 host on Hetzner dedicated server

- Xen 4.3

- Windows Server 2012 R2 guest

- GPLPV signed drivers downloaded from <http://wiki.univention.de/index.php?title=Installing-signed-GPLPV-drivers> (gplpv_Vista2008x64_0.11.0.372.msi)

- Problem reproduced with both bridged and routed networking setup 

- The server is new, has nothing setup or running on it apart from Xen and this single VM (since getting started with Xen on Hetzner was more challenging than expected, I wrote up a guide that includes the detailled config I'm using here if this helps: <http://blog.tickmeet.com/2013/10/setting-up-windows-server-2012-r2-on-xen.html>) 

With the config above, the connection fails when trying to access specific HTTPS endpoints. It seems that the TCP connection gets reset. 

Example 1:

Trying to load <https://login.live.com> in a web browser on the Windows guest results in:

Firefox: "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."

Chrome: "No data received - Error code: ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE"

IE 10: can't load page (don't have the exact error message)

Loading the http version of that page works just fine.

Loading HTTPS version from PowerShell using Invoke-WebRequest works fine too. I can only reproduce it consistently when loading the page in a web browser. I'm guessing that PowerShell must send request headers that cause the Microsoft's servers to serve a different page than what is served to browers.

Example 2:

Accessing the meetup.com API over HTTPS from a .NET 4.5 application results in the following exception for two specific endpoints of the API (but all the other endpoints work fine):

"System.IO.IOException : Received an unexpected EOF or 0 bytes from the transport stream"

General points:

- Networking in general works fine on the guest.

- All HTTP connections works 100% fine.

- The immense majority of HTTPS requests also work fine.

- The problem only occurs for a few very specific HTTPS requests and it's reproducible at least 99% of the time for those particular requests (occasionally, one of those requests will go through before failing again the next time). 

This problem has been driving me nuts for a good two days now. I tried everything I could think of to fix this to no avail. Eventually, last night, I remembered about the GPLPV drivers and wondered if they could be the culprit. So I uninstalled them and, lo and behold, everything works perfectly now. 

For those who want to uninstall the drivers, uninstalling the package via Add / Remove programs will most likely nuke your VM. If this happens, Windows should let you still boot using the last know good configuration, which will bring it back up again but it will still be using the GPLPV drivers. The .bat script for the 0.10 version at the bottom of <http://wiki.univention.de/index.php?title=Installing-signed-GPLPV-drivers> will take care of uninstalling them properly. A reboot and you should be good to go.

Cheers,

Mehdi

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