I came upon an issue recently that I thought I would share with you in hopes that it will prevent some headaches in the future.
I recently lost my ability to login to eWorkplace and NetBenefits. I tried several URLs netbenefits.com, 401k.com, eworkplaceservices.fidelity.com etc. all of which resulted in the following message that appeared before any login dialog.
“Unavailable
Sorry. This page is currently not available. Our technicians are at work updating this section and will restore service as soon as possible.”
After a lengthy troubleshooting process I was able to determine the cause of the error message was due to the length of the User-Agent string.
The User-Agent string is what a browser sends to a server so the server can determine what browser you are using, operating system etc. Here is a sample User-Agent string.
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; MS-RTC LM 8; MS-RTC S; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.1)
I was finally able to reach someone knowledgeable of the problem at Fidelity Electronic Support who informed me the User-Agent string could not exceed 256 characters. They were aware of the problem and a fix was on their to do list but with a very low priority.
Fortunately, it is easy to shorten the length of the User-Agent string. Simply delete one of the string values located here in the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform.
Unfortunately, if you delete one of these values you can break something else. For example, if you delete MS-RTC LM 8 from my sample User-Agent string you will break Live Meeting 8 since that is a value Live Meeting looks for in the User-Agent string.
As you can see it’s a bit of a catch 22!
Here is a MSDN article I found that explains User-Agent strings in more detail.
Filed under: Technology | Tagged: eWorkplace, Fidelity, Netbenefits, User-Agent
Thank you! You prevented a headache for me.
.NET developers beware as having multiple versions of the framework installed on my pc is what built my user-agent string to > 256 (just like in the post)!
Thanks for posting the user-agent fix. This hit me earlir this week and I reset the browser that worked but caused more work in other places. It hit me again about two weeks ago and I did much searching. Most of what I found were jsut complaints. This explained it and gave a solotuion. A fix on Fidelity’s part woul;d be better. If enough people complain they might work the issue. [yeah right]
note: I was able to reduce the length by uninstalling net framework 3 & 3.5. Once I had the fidelity site working, I let MS update renstall net framework bringing back the user-agent to the original length I had problems with. Fidelity still works, for now
Thanks for the great explanation and fix. This hit me yesterday. I followed a lot of other fixes until I found the silver bullet here. Much appreciated.
Great news everyone! I was able to work a few contacts through my work and Fidelity installed a fix for this issue over the weekend. If anyone still has this problem I’d be interested to know.