Some Web Servers Drop Guest Connections (e.g. Twitter)

[kleinfelter]

Some web sites drop connections from the guest, without returning anything (even headers). This happens with twitter.com when run from

• VMWare Fusion 2.0.2 on an OS X 10.5.5 host, with bridged networking, from a Windows XP SP3 guest

• VMWare Player 2.0.5 on a Windows XP SP3 host, with NAT networking, from a Windows XP SP3 guest

This behavior is independent of the tool I use to send the request to the server:

• I tried fetching http://twitter.com/ from Firefox, and the connection gets dropped before returning data to Firefox.

• I tried using "wget --user-agent=Mozilla --server-response http://twitter.com/" and it reports "Read error (Connection reset by peer) in headers"

• I tried using telnet to port 80 at twitter.com, and issuing "GET /" manually, and the host disconnects immediately after I press Enter after the "GET /"

Event Viewer on the Windows guests shows no errors. Neither guest is running a firewall. On both hosts, I can fetch the page via all the tools, but in the guest, twitter.com disconnects after receiving the request.

I'm not running a firewall on the OS X host. There is firewall software on the Windows host, but I told it not to filter connections. (I can't remove it entirely. Corporate IT policy.)

What else could I try? It really looks like some web servers are configured to reject GET requests that match some criteria, and VM guests match that criteria.