Freshrss: Prompt to open grey.gif

[dmusican]

Whenever I navigate to my local FreshRSS installation, I'm prompted to open the file gray.gif, which looks to me to be a one-pixel file. I can just cancel the browser pop-up to open the file, but it happens again sometimes when I switch to another feed. Any idea what's going on here?

[SuperSandro2000]

Sounds to me like the mime type might be wrong.

[hanshafner]

I have the same issue. It started out of the blue, although I have FreshRSS set to auto-update (I think...)

But more to the point: what do we have to change where for the correct MIME type...

[Frenzie]

Normally that would be the webserver.

[hanshafner]

I've checked the webserver and nginx.conf has the line

include /etc/nginx/mime.types

and the file mime.types has the line:

types {
...
image/gif gif;
...
}

So where else could this unwanted gif-download-behaviour be mistriggered?

[Frenzie]

Did you check what the headers are?

$ curl -I https://some.url/themes/icons/grey.gif
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 10:02:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
Upgrade: h2,h2c
Connection: Upgrade
Last-Modified: Sun, 31 May 2020 21:07:25 GMT
ETag: "38-5a6f810acd92c"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 56
Content-Type: image/gif

[hanshafner]

Thank you helping me through this.

The headers returned are:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 56
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 14:43:59 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.53

Content-Type seems to be wrong (should be image/gif) and it seems FreshRSS isn't served through nginx that FreshRSS installed, but through lighttpd that came with pihole which is running on the same machine.

That's very confusing to me being the amateur server admin.

[Frenzie]

Only one server socket can listen to a particular port. I don't know anything about pihole, but regardless if it's nginx or lighttps you'd expect image/gif to be the standard mimetype for .gif files so I'm somewhat confused either way.

If lighttpd is required for some webpage-based configuration, it shouldn't be too hard to run it on a different port? (Or vice versa, but I'd assume you wouldn't want to access the config on a daily basis like you might newsfeeds.)

[hanshafner]

Thank you for sending me on the right track.

Long story for the fix:
Yes, normally lighttpd does run on another port and whenever I upgrade pihole, I see that lighttpd resets to port 80 and then doesn't start, because nginx uses that one.
I had left off a ";" in nginx config that prevented nginx from starting and I never figured out why, because freshrss was still running (being served by lighttpd now...).
So after fixing the ";" I saw that I had to move lighttpd to its (on my setup) regular port.

Then both nginx and lighttpd worked again and the .gif download went away.

Again, thank you for taking the time and pointing me in the right direction!

As to why lighttpd handled the .gif differently... I don't know and I'm not going to try to find out. Unless the problem returns...

[dmusican]

Thanks: the problem was due to mime type settings; I'm also using pihole and lighttpd. Problem was solved by adding gif to the mime types in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.

[Alkarex]

@dmusican Is PNG correctly defined in lighttpd.conf ? If yes, we could upgrade that file to PNG

[Alkarex]

Ah, nevermind, we also have a few different loader.gif anyway