This looks like a bug in the RPC::XML::Server module related to compression.

Here's what's going on. The server decides it needs to compress the response data because it's over the compress_thresh threshold (defaults to 4 kB). It does this fine as you've discovered in the packet trace but what it's not doing is sending a Content-Type response header of deflate (in fact, it tries to set it but the value of $compress is never assigned). This causes the client to not know that it needs to filter the response through Compress::Zlib and fails silently when it tries to parse the XML. To overcome this, you can set the compress_thresh manually to an arbitrarily large number so the server never thinks it needs to compress the response. Otherwise you'll need to patch the RPC/XML/Server.pm file yourself so that the server sends the correct response header.

Basically all you need to do is add a $compress = $self->compress to the section of the code that compresses the response xml. (diff follows)

*** 1351,1356 ****
--- 1351,1357 ----
          }
          elsif ($req->method eq 'POST')
          {
+                       $compress = $self->compress;
              # Get a XML::Parser::ExpatNB object
              $parser = $self->parser->parse();

This code is already in the Apache::RPC::Server module that is included in this package so I'm sure it's just an oversight on the part of the module writer.

HTH - brian

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