Does Corfield have a cat?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8176971.stm

 

404

 

Works for me. It's about a cat that rides on the bus.

 

So, it's not Corfield's cat then?

 

Works for me too now. Weirdness.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, wessie

Corfield generally avoids pussies.

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - "He's hopeless, but he's honest"

I have already made the greatest contribution to the fight against climate
change that I can make: I have decided not to breed. Now quit bugging me and
go and talk to the Catholics.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, wessie

Mew...

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - "He's hopeless, but he's honest"

I have already made the greatest contribution to the fight against climate
change that I can make: I have decided not to breed. Now quit bugging me and
go and talk to the Catholics.

 

there was that day he went to the Transport Museum and met a right bunch...

 

Is Garfield a cat?

Well, yes.

 

Could be very similar to a slashdot problem - the page that handles
the comments on a story used to be on a different server than the one
that hosts the summaries, so if you visited a very new story you would
get a page error until it gets an update. I have seen similar on BBC
quite a few times, however theres nothing to suggest here why someone
could visit it after someone else and get a 404, then have it work
shortly after...

 

Load balancing multiple servers.

Requests from user A hit a server with the content. Requests from user B
hit a server that, for some reason, doesn't have the content. User B
tries again later, their persistence table entry has expired so they get
sent to a different server that does have the content. Or the server
they hit the time before has been fixed.

They used to have multiple server farms in different locations, some of
which used News's own content distribution system, others used a
different mechanism, so they could quite easily be out of sync if there
was a backlog of stuff to distribute.

 

Whatever load balancing they're using should never allow that to happen.

 

What do you expect the load balancer to do, maintain a list of every
file on every server and send healthcheck probes for all of them?

 

You're talking about a completely missing page so there should be
monitoring in place preferably on the load balancer or externally that
would pick this up.

 

So you want the load balancer to identify any server that responds to
any request with a 404 and remove it from the pool?

Genius.

 

<scratches head>

And this would be a bad thing because?

If you're talking about individual objects within a page then more
likely it would be alerting via external monitoring.

 

http://bbc.co.uk/fat-scottish-one-eyed-****.htm

That's one server down. Hit F5 etc etc.

 

For his next trick, Buckley will argue bus routes with Corfield.

 

Nnnngh, clearly it would have to be a valid page.

 

I was under the impression that products were available that did this
dynamically and even confirmed this with an F5 guy the last time they
tried to bring us into their channel[1]. Reading their ref guide though
it appears they're either keeping it well hidden or health monitoring
hasn't come on at all in the last 5 years - which is when I first
started messing with Alteons[2] and which I've always been told are
pretty much the worst products on the market. That's a bit
disappointing.


[1] Ended up with Barracuda, which if I hadn't handed my notice in I'd
be getting training for this week.
[2] Only 8 configurable healthcheck scripts per appliance