Whenever I try to access a NTLM authenticated intranet site, Safari takes forever to process and then comes back with "The sever is unavailable" or if allowed by the site, loads with out authenticating. I can access these same sites with no problems in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. The sites are hosted on IIS6 and are being generated with either ASP, ASP.Net 1.1 or ASP.Net 2.0.
Any insight on why Safari choking on these sites? Are there any work-arounds to get NTLM to correctly authenticate with Safari?
Update:
In further playing with it I have determined that NTLM will work (with the page loading reasonably fast) if I am using the FQDN for the site (i.e. http://mysite doesn't work, but http://mysite.domain.prv will work). Unfortunately, this will not work due to other constraints on the project.
Does anyone know why the FQDN would work but the shorter name will not? Is this something that can be worked around or is it "Sorry out of luck"?
Update 2:
According to the Wireshark packet sniffer, safari sends a SYN to the correct severs IP address. The intranet sever responds with a SYN, ACK, to which safari sends an ACK. This is the end in communication between safari and the sever. When attempting to access the intranet site by FQDN these three packets were the same but were then followed by a HTTP GET request, which then successfully loaded the page.
Because Safari is connecting to the correct IP address, I find it hard to believe that Safari just doesn't support NetBIOS/WINS names. Additionally, because the NTLM packets are never exchanged as safari never sends the initial GET request, I'm certain that NTLM has nothing to do with this issue.
Does anyone know the status of safari's support of NetBIOS/WINS?