The problem seems to have something to do with the new line of Netscape/Mozilla clients (since around Netscape 4.7).

I have had a perl cgi application running on a Netscape Fasttrack Server 3.01 (a forerunner of the iPlanet-Servers) on HP-UX 10.20 (now 11.0) since 1998 and it never did this kind of thing with the old browsers.

By analyzing the logs and results from debugging code I was astonished to find that everything was actually going as expected: cgi a was executed, the browser received the redirect, called cgi b, which was executed and completed. But still I kept getting core files, no output in the browser and logs of TIMEOUTS or PREMATURE EOFs as seen below until I changed from relative to absolute URLs as described by Michiel above.

[25/Oct/2002:20:46:16] failure: for host 141.36.65.205 trying to GET /
+cgi-bin/fw/fw_ordner.pl, send-cgi reports: error occurred while sendi
+ng content to script (IO timeout error)
[28/Oct/2002:10:49:57] failure: for host 141.36.65.205 trying to GET /
+cgi-bin/fw/fw_ordner.pl, send-cgi reports: error occurred while sendi
+ng content to script (premature EOF)
[download]

This is very strange.