APEX

We're still having problems accessing our APEX applications using Firefox. We stood up a development environment to simulate our production environment and we think we have narrowed down the problem to NTLM...but for those that are more knowledgeable in this area I hope you can shed some light on what it is about NTLM that is the problem. Initially we thought Firefox wasn't configured correctly, but as you can see from our step by step tests below that doesn't appear to be the case.

1) The APEX applications work in Firefox without using any authentication and before we joined the dev environment to the domain.

2) The APEX applications work in Firefox without using any authentication after we joined the dev environment to the domain, yet we received the popup asking for a username/password. Once we modified the about:config file and added the URL to the network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris preferences we stopped receiving the popup window. At one time we thought the Group Policy was causing the problem but after joining the dev environment to the domain and the Group Policy was applied, this ruled that out as being the culprit.

3) We then implemented NTLM using the instructions we found on the following website -> http://www.greenit.li/website/content/OracleApplicationExpressProofOfConceptNTLM.doc
which is what we currently use in our production environment and works when using Internet Explorer. The APEX applications stopped working in Firefox. We commented out the NTLM references in the dads.conf file and the APEX applications started working in Firefox. We also followed the instructions on Oracle's Whitepaper (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/pdf/apex_ntlm_authentication_wp.pdf) and Jason Straub's blog (http://jastraub.blogspot.com/2008/03/ntlm-http-authentication-and.html) to incorporate NTLM but didn't have any success there either.

4) We thought our mod_ntlm.so file was corrupted somehow so we downloaded another copy, added the NTLM references back into the dads.conf file, and the APEX applications still didn't work.

- When I open the browser and navigate to the first page of an APEX app, my username (:APP_USER) shows up correctly.

- All of the .conf files on production and development environments are identical, except of course for the connection strings/references to the domain name.

- The message in the error_log file is: mod_plsql: request method not supported

- After a “submit” is executed, a 501 Method Not Implemented page appears and the url reads http://hal-00-vdb-03:7777/pls/apex/wwv_flow.accept and the error we receive in the browser is:
mod_plsql: request method not supported

- The Live HTTP Header returns a HTTP/1.x 401 Authorization Required message.

- I assume the 501 error is a result of the 401 Authorization Required (if there was no authorization then the method was not implemented).

- We’re running:
Oracle 10g
Apache Standalone 10.1.2.0.0
Apex 3.1
Firefox 3.0

Can anyone make any sense of what the problem might be? We're pretty desperate for a solution!