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January 25, 2013 at 11:20 pm

To answer your other question – this is a single site install.

January 28, 2013 at 11:24 pm

Josh,

Thank you for your response. I will send login details.

It is an odd behavior. It seems something is blocking the request before it gets very far. Perhaps wordpress, htaccess or the hosting provider.

As for wordpress, I assume that when you request/post to xmlrpc.php, that is the first file it will load (if it’s not blocked). I put in a debug statement as the first line, and it does not get triggered unless I use the WordPress iOS app. Makes sense, as it’s a 404 error returned.

As for htaccess, I tried commenting out each htaccess rule just to see if that helped, but nothing changed. Makes sense, as none of the rules rewrote to a 404. However, I don’t understand htaccess that well, so I may have missed something.

I have not yet contacted my hosting provider on this issue.

While researching how xmlrpc works and troubleshooting tips, I found that every example had the Content-Type: text/xml; header. It seems to be an important item. I’m not sure what would be blocking a request without that, but I wonder if it’s not a good thing. As I mentioned, the WordPress iOS app has it, but the EE iOS app doesn’t have it in the request sent to the website, which is not related to what plugins, htaccess rules or hosting provider rules are in place.

I will send my login details and look forward to what you find.

Thanks again for your time and assistance!

January 29, 2013 at 3:53 pm

Sorry, I neglected to test the ftp login before I sent it. I have sent updated credentials.

I just tested the WordPress app and it was able to connect and it refreshed to show the latest posts.

I also removed htaccess and tried the EE app. It sent “blog returned invalid data” instead of 404. I’ll have to put my virtual wifi/wireshark setup back together and see what it says. (i’ve put htaccess back for now).

I’ll wait to hear back from you. I don’t want to step on your toes if you’re doing any file changes.

Thanks again!

January 29, 2013 at 5:46 pm

6.1 (had 6.0.x while doing the initial network tracing.

January 29, 2013 at 9:28 pm

That kinda makes sense based on what I’m seeing in the network traffic. I see the redirects and then the followup call/post.
I did some further packet analysis, specifically with htaccess removed. What I found is that without htaccess, any call to xmlrpc.php from EE iOS app gets a 403 forbidden response.
Calls from the WordPress iOS app do not get this response, and works correctly.
I tested again with wfecth it behaved as expected – 403 error without Content-Type header; valid response with it.

Since there is no htaccess in these cases, I suspect the hosting provider has some sort of blocking enabled perhaps blocking POST without this header (who knows?). I have submitted a ticket to validate. I am hoping they can confirm so we can at least pinpoint the cause.

January 31, 2013 at 10:45 am

Ok, my hosting provider gave me the details behind this. The scenario I had them research was with no htaccess using the EE iOS app. Their response was that this request was being blocked by mod_security with a rule that blocks anything without a Content-Length or Content-Type header.
They considered this a “won’t fix” request – i.e. they won’t disable that rule for security reasons.
Their exact response: “Basically the argument is that this is a valid block since the requests don’t contain a Content-Type header. Would it be possible to modify your applications which are trying to hit the xmlrpc.php file to include, at the very least, this header?”

Also, I don’t have the ability to override any modsecurity rules in htaccess. All the usual commands that people suggest to solve this result in a 500 internal server error.

Thanks again for your effort looking into this. Hopefully this is helpful information. I would prefer to stay with my hosting provider, and I agree with the security stance.
Is this something you would consider fixing in your iOS app?