It appears that if

• you’re using Android’s HttpURLConnection (2.3 is the specific source of the grievance), and you’re talking to certain web servers (ahem, in this case nginx with varnish in front of it, if the headers are to be believed).
• you call setDoOutput(true)
• you call setChunkedStreamingMode()

then calling getOutputStream() will cause your later call to getResponseCode() to return a 503 HTTP_UNAVAILABLE.

Isn’t that nice? My fix was to precompute the POST data so I could call setFixedLengthStreamingMode() with its length instead.

PS. You know how I said it was fun? I lied.

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