[Gllug] webcaches

[Ian Northeast]

Jason Clifford wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Matthew Thompson wrote:
> 
> > I'm in charge of a number of dynamic websites which I like to check
> > from my home connection whilst developing. If my ISP had included a
> > webcache I would not trust the connection to test the site as you can
> > not be sure that you are seeing the served page or the cached page.
> 
> I am in a similar position. I am connected via NTL and they have awful
> web caches.

They've been sort of OK for the past few weeks (touches wooden desk with
crossed fingers). Performance is still crap but at least they're
delivering the correct data (no more random national flags on
google.com).

The worst thing about them from my POV is that we have web servers at
work which can only be accessed if you authenticate your IP to the
company firewall. Of course the web cache is not authenticated, nor
would I want it to be so I will not frig this one. I have to circumvent
it by running extra virtual hosts on non standard ports, or setting up
proxies for the servers which are not under my control. It's a PITA and
doesn't always work, especially when IIS is involved (which of course it
isn't on anything I run:)

BTW I once blamed NTL's web caches for a peculiar problem someone was
having with a web site he hosted, but it turned out that he had screwed
up his DNS (in a quite inventive way, involving NS records for non
domains IIRC) some considerable time earlier, then corrected the error,
but had put a very large TTL on the bad records. So they were still
hanging around in a few places, but not on the authoritative servers. In
particular, his bad DNS records had been cached by the nameservers the
NTL web caches use. Debugging this was made very much harder by my
assumption that if a web site doesn't work from NTL but does from
elsewhere then it must be those poxy caches. On this occasion they were
not at fault.

In defense of NTL I should say that apart from the web caches, and their
apology for support, the service is very good. I've had it since July
and in this time they have had one outage of a few hours, with a
recorded message on the support line saying so, and have had to reboot
the cable modem once for no apparant reason (apart from its being dead).
This is not bad going by UK ISP standards. I always get the 1Mb/s
bandwidth I should when using e.g. FTP and not going via the caches.

Regards, Ian

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug