Subject: [TOOLS-DEVELOPMENT] Status page for <http://tools.ietf.org/> ?

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:29:07 -0700

Greetings again. Is there a status page for the Tools website, hopefully maintained on a system that is not co-located with the website? In the past few days, I have gotten strange results when trying to access <http://tools.ietf.org/>, where it takes a long time to get a response but no page comes up. Being able to go to a page that says "yes, we know this is down" would be useful.

Short of that, is there a way to determine which of the two machines (208.66.40.242 vs. 194.146.105.14) might be causing a problem at a given moment?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2010 23:59:19 +0200

Hi Paul

On 2010-04-17 17:29 Paul Hoffman said the following:
> Greetings again. Is there a status page for the Tools website,
> hopefully maintained on a system that is not co-located with the
> website?

Umm.  I have monitoring in place, but no status page like the one you
ask for here.  The main reason till now has been that whenever one of
the servers have been down, I've seen it and fixed it or adjusted the
DNS records before anybody else seems to have seen it as more than a
transient issue...

> In the past few days, I have gotten strange results when
> trying to access <http://tools.ietf.org/>, where it takes a long time
> to get a response but no page comes up. 

!! Ouch!  Checking all the machines which should be active at this time
(23:54 CEST 18 April 2010) they all respond virtually instantly to
me.  This doesn't mean there isn't a problem, but makes it more likely
that it's a routing or peering problem, rather than a server problem.

> Being able to go to a page
> that says "yes, we know this is down" would be useful.

I see.  That can be fixed.

(I think that as long as I'm running tools.ietf.org you'll never see
such a message at that page, since I'll do my damndest to see to it
that people don't have a bad experience going to tools.ietf.org -- in
other words, if I know about a problem so that there would be a 'down'
message up, I've probably already fixed it.  But there could be
exceptions.)

> Short of that, is there a way to determine which of the two machines
> (208.66.40.242 vs. 194.146.105.14) might be causing a problem at a
> given moment?

Mmm.  There's one page on each of the machines which is never redirected:

http://tools.ietf.org/server

If you go to that, it should tell you the name and address of the machine
you're being pointed at, which would be the machine having trouble.

Of course, if you can't get a response from the box, that's not very
helpful; then a commandline 'host tools.ietf.org' might give you a
relevant answer -- but since it seems browsers sometime cache dns responses
longer than they should, this isn't certain either...

I'd appreciate getting more information about the problem -- including which
IP address you're connecting from, so I can search the logs on the server.

Regards,

	Henrik

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From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:38:28 -0700

>you're being pointed at, which would be the machine having trouble.

Just now, I tried to run the idnits tool. The site took forever (>1 min) to respond. After a while, it started to give me the idnits page, but then took forever (>5 min). The same was true for "server".

>longer than they should, this isn't certain either...

# host tools.ietf.org
tools.ietf.org has address 208.66.40.242
tools.ietf.org has address 194.146.105.14
tools.ietf.org has IPv6 address 2a01:3f0::31:214:22ff:fe21:bb
tools.ietf.org has IPv6 address 2001:1890:1112:1::2a
tools.ietf.org mail is handled by 5 zinfandel.tools.ietf.org.
tools.ietf.org mail is handled by 10 merlot.tools.ietf.org.
tools.ietf.org mail is handled by 20 shiraz.tools.ietf.org.

I vote "uncertain".

>IP address you're connecting from, so I can search the logs on the server.

75.101.18.87 at the moment.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium