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I am using Windows 7 Pro x64 and I am able to visit this site in Chrome without problems.

However, Internet Explorer (v 11.0.9600.17959) will just time out and show:

This page can’t be displayed.

I’m guessing it’s a configuration problem on my end. What did I break?

Shorter answer

Based on the testing I have done, there is appears to be a 302 redirect loop happening when using curl to debug the site/URL. And that 302 redirect loop would cause the site to be unloadable in some browsers.

That said, curl is a fairly dumb HTTP testing tool which cannot handle cookies and based on HTTP headers sent back from the debugging process it seems like that website is endlessly trying to set a cookie on the client side. Which is not a good thing.

Knowing that, one can assume that if the site goes into a 302 redirect loop when it fails to set a cookie when testing with curl, perhaps your install of Internet Explorer 11 has something odd to it that is preventing the ivytech.edu server from setting a cookie as well? Which would then cause a 302 redirect loop condition on the server and then force the page to fail to load properly when Internet Explorer 11 runs into that 302 redirect loop.

Which is all to say I find the ivytech.edu server cookie/session setup to be problematic from a technical/“build-to-fail” point of view. And I believe that even if there is indeed an issue with your install of Internet Explorer 11, the ivytech.edu server cookie/session setup is a problem waiting to happen. And sadly, you happened to trip over that problem. Server connections should not fail like that due to their inability to connect to a client; that is bad engineering.

Longer answer

You say this:

I’m guessing it’s a configuration problem on my end. What did I break?

First, don’t blame yourself when you can blame always Internet Explorer! And in this case, don’t even blame Internet Explorer because it seems like there is something wrong with that website itself that Chrome allowed but Internet Explorer choked on. This is how I was able to diagnose it.

First, I went to the W3C Markup Validator to check the URL itself. And I received the following message:

Sorry! This document cannot be checked.

Which is basically the same as the message you are getting in Internet Explorer, but since the W3C Markup Validator is an HTML debugging tool it gave me more info:

Redirect loop detected (max_redirect = 7)

Aha! That’s the problem! The server itself is redirection the URL more than 7 times which is considered bad practice.

To do further debugging I opened up Terminal (I am on a Mac OS X machine) and tested that URL with curl like this:

curl -I -L http://cc.ivytech.edu/cp/home/displaylogin

The -I option to simply return bare HTTP headers and the -L tells curl to follow all redirects. And what I saw after that was the following endlessly looping between these two locations:

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

Server: nginx/1.6.2

Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 05:00:42 GMT

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 160

Connection: close

Location: https://ccapps.ivytech.edu/cgi-bin/ccsession/session.cgi



HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 05:00:43 GMT

Server: Apache/2.2.15 (Red Hat)

Set-Cookie: CCSESSID=nWSdtHa8fQQSLmBsRYQZhalig3r5GYNW; domain=.ivytech.edu; path=/

Location: http://cc.ivytech.edu/cp/home/displaylogin

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Note how the first HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily redirects to https://ccapps.ivytech.edu/cgi-bin/ccsession/session.cgi which then sends back a HTTP/1.1 302 Found that then redirects to the first URL again, http://cc.ivytech.edu/cp/home/displaylogin. That is weird. There is no valid reason I know of for a web server to endlessly being looping URL locations like this.

So the issue is might not on your end. Somehow Chrome is working well with this odd server setup on the ivytech.edu server. But Internet Explorer is basically doing what it’s being told to do and then saying, “Hey, why is this redirecting like crazy? I give up.”

But I did say might, right?

Perhaps the issue is on the server at ivytech.edu or perhaps this is a cookie/session issue. Note that on the second hop the header is attempting to set a cookie via Set-Cookie: CCSESSID=nWSdtHa8fQQSLmBsRYQZhalig3r5GYNW; domain=.ivytech.edu; path=/. In curl that directive from the server will never be able to set a cookie since curl is a fairly “dumb” and simple HTTP testing tool; so maybe the inability for curl to set a cookie is causing the loop? And knowing that, one might deduce that something in your Internet Explorer 11 setup is causing cookie setup issues as well?

What this all means: There is might be nothing wrong on the client side; aka: your side. But maybe the web server at ivytech.edu that manages that website/URL has issues. And perhaps there is a cookie/session issue as well when it comes to your Internet Explorer 11 setup handling this website? I would consider contacting their tech support team and alerting them to this issue and maybe even point them to this thread for reference. Heck, for all you know this is a combo of their server setup as well as local cookie/session issues.

Recently we had similar issue where one of the website worked in Chrome and not in IE. Though the page was rendered, we were not able to login in IE. Finally the problem was that, the hostname has a "_" (underscore) in the URL which IE errored out. Once we renamed the site without underscope. Worked in both .

Check the website isn't added to Compatibility View. Check the IE Tools - Compatibility View Settings. I was also having issues rendering in IE and not in Chrome, resulting in being unable to get the SAML response. This turned out to be the cause.