Apple/Safari Question

April 25, 2004 4:53 PM

Apple/Safari question: I am at wits end with a strange problem. Every time I download certain files from my webserver (gzip'd tar'd gpg'd backup files), safari renames them. The files are named in the following format: filename.tar.gz.gpg. Safari renames them on the fly to filename.tar.gz.gz, which it then tries to unzip to predictable results since they haven't been unencrypted yet. Each file needs to be renamed after being d/loaded, which is kind of annoying. I turn to you Ask-metafilter; any ideas?
posted by tcaleb to computers & internet (9 comments total)

is it a speed download thing?

Under the Safari Help menu is Installed Plug-Ins...maybe you should do a Find for the Speed Download one and delete it? That may stop it.
posted by amberglow at 6:53 PM on April 25, 2004

maybe switch off the auto-open feature in the preferences, and see if that changes anything.
posted by rorycberger at 7:49 PM on April 25, 2004

Firefox does that to me. Dunno why.
posted by dobbs at 8:07 PM on April 25, 2004

No Speed Download installed, and unticking 'open safe files' doesn't help. Good ideas though. Thanks anyway.

Also, firefox, incidentally, does kind of work. I did something or other (I think I was playing around with some 3rd party preference pane that let me fool with file types) to make it open with pgp when downloaded. This is slightly less annoying then the previously described problem, but not by much. I just want the damn files to download and be saved to the HD.

Thanks for your help.
posted by tcaleb at 8:18 PM on April 25, 2004

If you have control over the mime types on your server, try to get it to return application/octet-stream for .gpg file types. This may keep Safari from messing with the extensions. If it's Apache and .htaccess files work, try adding this line to your .htaccess file:
AddType application/octet-stream pgp
Looking at the default Apache configuration, it thinks that .pgp is application/pgp-signature. Maybe since Safari doesn't know what to do with it, it's renaming it. Just a guess.
posted by zsazsa at 9:03 PM on April 25, 2004

Yeah, what do your http headers for the download look like? They might be misconfigured.
posted by holloway at 9:04 PM on April 25, 2004

I have tried messing with the mime types. I just tried octet-stream, but that didn't help. Here is a copy of the headers...

069.093.113.181.00080-010.000.001.002.64764: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 04:46:42 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Red Hat Linux)
Last-Modified: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 05:00:52 GMT
ETag: "c213-94029-251a8900"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 606249
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/pgp-encrypted
Content-Encoding: x-gzip

That content-Encoding is kind of strange... But I could have sworn it worked properly at work on a Win2k/IE machine. I will have to check again tomorrow. Plus, when I start the download, for a split second I see the file in the download window, properly named and with the pgp icon before it is renamed and the icon changes to the unstuffit one.

Thanks everyone for the good ideas. This certainly is a puzzler.
posted by tcaleb at 9:45 PM on April 25, 2004

Seems like that Content-Encoding is the problem. I'd guess Safari is trying to be "smart" and "helpful" by renaming the file to match the encoding so it can be handed off to a helper app successfully. Find some way to override that header and I'd bet it will work fine.
posted by jjg at 10:47 AM on April 26, 2004

I will give it a try when I get home from work. Thanks for the help everyone.
posted by tcaleb at 11:20 AM on April 26, 2004