[vox] A hypothetical question about the Web's dark underbelly

[Ken Bloom]

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On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 02:40:23PM -0800, Richard Crawford wrote:
> Our website normally works like this: you browse to it, wind up in a
> frameset, and everything you do is in that frameset.  In fact, if you go
> to our login page directly, it pops up a JavaScript saying "We will now
> load the content in a frameset", and then redirects to the frameset.  If
> you go to our front page and click on "Login", though, that issue doesn't
> come up.
>=20
> Now, we have a user in San Jose who is experiencing serious problems with
> our website.  He gets to the front page fine, then clicks on "Login", and
> then all of a sudden gets the pop-up box and the page refuses to load.=20
> Now, we did have a problem with our site last week, but that issue has
> been fixed.  But he's still getting the problem.  I've gone through our
> code with a fine-toothed comb, restarted our servers, cleared out our
> various caches, and double-checked with several people throughout the
> state... and no one else is getting this problem.
>=20
> I had the user do a "tracert" from the Windows command prompt, and he told
> me that there were a few hops toward the end where the connection timed
> out.  Is it possible that one of his ISP's routers, or another router
> somewhere else along the way, has the bad page stored and is serving that
> to him instead of the proper page?
>=20
> By the way, if anyone wants to try to reproduce the error themselves, go
> to http://unexdlc.ucdavis.edu and click on the "Login" link.  If you get
> the popup about the framesets, please let me know (a popup about technical
> support being available on Monday is proper).

Routers don't store web pages. Proxies do, but you'll never find
whether there's a proxy using tracert. Have the user check his web
browser configuration and see whether there's a proxy configured, if
that's the route you plan to explore.

--=20
I usually have a GPG digital signature included as an attachment.
See http://www.gnupg.org/ for info about these digital signatures.
My key was last signed 10/14/2003. If you use GPG *please* see me about=20
signing the key. ***** My computer can't give you viruses by email. ***

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