[ILUG] Mary Celeste website

[Niall O Broin]

On 12 Jun 2006, at 15:00, Declan Moriarty wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 13:27 +0100, Niall O Broin wrote:
>> On 12 Jun 2006, at 12:50, Kenn Humborg wrote:
>>
>>>>  From 13:14 to 14:06 there were 0 hits recorded in the logs for the
>>>> site . Traffic levels didn't return to normal (arbitrarily defined
>>>> for this site as hundreds of hits/minute) until 14:28.
>
> /From the "Full marks for your imagination anyhow" dept:
>
> This site was on a different type of domain (e.g. .lu instead of .com
> or  .ie) and there was something wrong with the dns on or route to the
> first server everyone asks about .lu, and _nothing_ wrong with your  
> box.
> That would even explain the slow return of full traffic.

It wouldn't explain the abrupt cutoff of traffic at 13:14 though. And  
the site concerned is a .com site anyway.

> What's more interesting (and I'm not sure you can figure it) is this:
> What happened to the people currently on the site at that time? Did  
> they
> get cut off?

Ah, you've subscribed to the fiction that people can be "on" a site  
at a particular point in time. HTTP is a stateless protocol - fetch a  
page, and you get it or you don't - there is NO on, despite what  
those selling statistics will tell you. But ignore me - you just  
pushed one of my buttons there.

> Is it virtualised in a way that some strange <expletive
> deleted> way that some twit could tell it it didn't exist?

I don't really know what you mean, but I think the answer is no. It's  
a vhost on a webserver which serves many such (although this  
particular host does have its own IP on the server, which might or  
might not be unrelated to this glitch).

> Actually, It's the "Marie Celeste" but we all made that leap without
> difficulty.

Adequately answered by Francis Daly.


Niall