Can anyone connect to this URL?
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Thu, 01 Sep 1994 07:16:39 -0700
I have encountered a very strange problem. On Monday, my MOMspider
program tested (did a HEAD request) on the following URL
http://pc68.its.utas.edu.au/home.htm
and got a result code of 200. Unfortunately, it then dropped into
an infinite loop somewhere between obtaining the result and indexing it
(the first time this has ever happenned). I have a feeling that it may
be something weird in the headers, but for some reason I cannot connect
to that server now. And then things got stranger ....
When running the HEAD client, I was getting back a timed-out response.
So, I edited the client to increase the timeout to 60 seconds -- no effect.
Then, I upped it again to 300 seconds and, much to my surprise, the client
still timed-out after 30 seconds. Soooo, figuring that I messed up the
variable somewhere, I ran it with the debugger. I stepped through everything
and it remained 300 right up to the alarm() call in wwwhttp. So, I continued
stepping through -- expecting the alarm to go off in 30 seconds -- and it
didn't. Instead, the call to connect() failed with its own "timed out"
message after about 80 seconds, and the client returned a "Connection
failed" response. Weird. I tried it again and got the same result.
I then exited the debugger and ran it normally -- the result was 603 Timed Out
after 30 seconds (the timeout value was still 300 seconds).
So, the upshot is that something very strange is happening with the
alarm timeout which gets "fixed" when run under the debugger. Also,
the connect() system call (C version used by perl) seems to have an
internal timeout as well.
Anybody know what's going on? Also, if someone could perform a HEAD
or get on that URL and send me the results, I'd appreciate it.
....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
(fielding@ics.uci.edu)
<A HREF="http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding">About Roy</A>