Hi Folks,
My wife enjoys buying bits from eBay now and again but she has been unable to log on since Wednesday. If you are familiar with the login process she completes the login page successfully but when she tries to go to her "My eBay" page (or in fact any page), or do a search, after this she gets a "Page Not Found" DNS error.
This error only occurs when accessing eBay using NTL and everything behaves normally if she accesses it using a dial-up ISP. We have no problems with accessing any other sites using NTL; this problem is specific to eBay's site.
Yesterday I logged on to eBay using my Dial-Up, done a few "ping"s to suss out the IP Addresses of the relevant eBay servers and manually entered them into my hosts table. This did not resolve the problem so I contacted eBay technical support who suggested that the "DNS Error" we are getting may be a red herring and the problem may be with NTL's WEB Page Cache. I am starting to think eBay's suspicion of a broken NTL WEB Cache is correct.
I suppose I could trying ringing NTLs Support helpline but, from past experience, they offer very little useful advice apart from telling me to reformat my hard disk and reinstall Windows (bit of a waste of time as I am not using Windows). I was therefore wondering if anyone else had come across this problem and knows how to get round it.
In particular I would firstly like to know if there is a way I can discover conclusively if the problem is indeed with NTL's WEB Cache or not, and secondly, if it is, if there is a way I can bypass this and access the real eBay pages directly.
Just in case it is relevant I have tried using Microsoft Explorer 6 on my Windows partition and Mozilla and Opera on my Linux partition.
Thanks,
Ian.
On Sat, 5 Jul 2003, Ian Douglas wrote:
In particular I would firstly like to know if there is a way I can discover conclusively if the problem is indeed with NTL's WEB Cache or not, and secondly, if it is, if there is a way I can bypass this and access the real eBay pages directly.
Hi Ian,
Is the webcache a transparent one, our do you have to explicitly configure your webbrowser to use it. If it is a transparent one, ie NTL intercept all outbound data to port 80 and direct it thorough their cache, you could try the following...
telnet www.ebay.co.uk 80 HEAD http://www.ebay.co.uk HTTP/1.0
Then hit enter twice. If NTL's cache is transparent, you should get an output similar to that below...
HTTP/1.0 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 IISExport: This web site was exported using IIS Export v2.2 Content-Location: http://www.ebay.co.uk/index.html Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:05:44 GMT Content-Type: text/html Accept-Ranges: bytes Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 11:54:34 GMT ETag: "0397c33ec42c31:13346" Content-Length: 41168 X-Cache: MISS from gateway.glovercc.clara.co.uk Proxy-Connection: close
The X-Cache line is the important one. I am running my own Squid proxy at home, and I do sometimes have problems with DNS errors if my ADSL drops out whilst making a request. Sometimes the problem sorts itself, other times I have to restart squid.
If the cache is not transparent, you will not see the X-Cache line.
Hope that helps.
Chris
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your suggestion:
Is the webcache a transparent one, our do you have to explicitly configure your webbrowser to use it.
No, I don't have to configure my browser, so I guess it is supposed to be transparent.
If it is a transparent one, ie NTL intercept all outbound data to port 80 and direct it thorough their cache, you could try the following...
telnet www.ebay.co.uk 80 HEAD http://www.ebay.co.uk HTTP/1.0
Then hit enter twice. If NTL's cache is transparent, you should get an output similar to that below...
HTTP/1.0 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 IISExport: This web site was exported using IIS Export v2.2 Content-Location: http://www.ebay.co.uk/index.html Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:05:44 GMT Content-Type: text/html Accept-Ranges: bytes Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 11:54:34 GMT ETag: "0397c33ec42c31:13346" Content-Length: 41168 X-Cache: MISS from gateway.glovercc.clara.co.uk Proxy-Connection: close
I get:
[ian@heron ian]$ telnet www.ebay.co.uk 80 Trying 66.135.192.41... Connected to www.ebay.co.uk (66.135.192.41). Escape character is '^]'. HEAD http://www.ebay.co.uk HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 IISExport: This web site was exported using IIS Export v2.2 Content-Location: http://www.ebay.co.uk/index.html Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:19:15 GMT Content-Type: text/html Accept-Ranges: bytes Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:09:22 GMT ETag: "045c644ee42c31:11ab7" Content-Length: 41078 Age: 0 Via: HTTP/1.1 ntl-site (Traffic-Server/5.2.2-58903 [cMsSf ]) Connection closed by foreign host.
The X-Cache line is the important one.
If the cache is not transparent, you will not see the X-Cache line.
Cannot see one.
Ian.
On Sat, 5 Jul 2003, Ian Douglas wrote:
I get:
[ian@heron ian]$ telnet www.ebay.co.uk 80 Trying 66.135.192.41... Connected to www.ebay.co.uk (66.135.192.41). Escape character is '^]'. HEAD http://www.ebay.co.uk HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0 IISExport: This web site was exported using IIS Export v2.2 Content-Location: http://www.ebay.co.uk/index.html Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:19:15 GMT Content-Type: text/html Accept-Ranges: bytes Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:09:22 GMT ETag: "045c644ee42c31:11ab7" Content-Length: 41078 Age: 0 Via: HTTP/1.1 ntl-site (Traffic-Server/5.2.2-58903 [cMsSf ]) Connection closed by foreign host.
I think the "Via:" line is significant... Time to start shouting at NTL
On Saturday, July 05, 2003 1:26 PM, Chris Glover wrote:
On Sat, 5 Jul 2003, Ian Douglas wrote:
I get: Via: HTTP/1.1 ntl-site (Traffic-Server/5.2.2-58903 [cMsSf ])
I think the "Via:" line is significant...
Time to start shouting at NTL.
Thanks for that Chris. I contacted NTL Support about their broken Colchester Cache yesterday but, as usual, their emailed acknowledgement of my support request includes those famous words epitomising customer care: "Due to the large volume of emails we receive, we cannot guarantee to reply personally to each one" so whether or not they will actually bother to do anything about it, or simply loose my comment amongst their "large volume" of support calls, remains to be seen.
Ian.
Ian Douglas alug@k1ngph1cher.com writes:
Is the webcache a transparent one, our do you have to explicitly configure your webbrowser to use it.
No, I don't have to configure my browser, so I guess it is supposed to be transparent.
That's correct; NTL have a intercepting web proxy. ("transparent" is not a very accurate description IMHO.) It seems to work better than it used to but I'm not surprised to hear that it's still not right...
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2002/03/squid.html describes the workaround I use, but it might not help in this case.
On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 12:32:33PM +0100, Ian Douglas wrote:
I suppose I could trying ringing NTLs Support helpline but, from past experience, they offer very little useful advice apart from telling me to reformat my hard disk and reinstall Windows (bit of a waste of time as I am not using Windows). I was therefore wondering if anyone else had come across this problem and knows how to get round it.
This page may be useful http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/trancache.html
I have referred customers to it before when they have done things like uploaded a new version of their website and of course cannot see the changes but their freinds on other isps can etc. Of course NTL at first lied to the customer and denied even having webcaches but after a bit the customer got through a "customer service manager" who admitted it and said the only real solution was not to use NTL!
Of course this is exactly the way that I have got around the problem and because of it I am unlikely to ever become an NTL customer :) and I have been having to deal with the problems that NTL cause with their agressive webcaches in various forms since ~late 2000 (when one day they forced the company I was working at to use a webcache when we had an NTL leased line (of course the first we knew of it was about 5 minutes after it was installed and started breaking things, of course they backed down when they realised that UUNet could install a leased line within 7 days)
Sorry I can't really help more.
Adam
On Saturday, July 05, 2003 2:04 PM, Adam Bower wrote:
This page may be useful http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/trancache.html
Excellent! Thanks for that link Adam.
As a temporary measure I have followed one of it's suggestions and simply manually configured my browser to explicitly use an NTL Cache from another part of the country. Not ideal but at least it allows me to carry on using the internet until they get round to sorting out their Colchester Cache.
Ian.
Hi,
Yes, there are problems with the NTHell intercepting caches.
On Sun, 6 Jul 2003, Ian Douglas wrote:
As a temporary measure I have followed one of it's suggestions and simply manually configured my browser to explicitly use an NTL Cache from another part of the country. Not ideal but at least it allows me to carry on using the internet until they get round to sorting out their Colchester Cache.
Other sites that are broken via the cache include:
ntlhome.com (yes, really) sainsburystoyou.co.uk ibank.barclays.co.uk www.ananova.com
... and many more. NTL's workaround is "use another cache".
A.
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Adam Bower -
Andrew Savory -
Chris Glover -
Ian Douglas -
Richard Kettlewell