nanog mailing list archives
Re: How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?)
From: Wil Schultz <wschultz () bsdboy com>
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 12:22:25 -0700
I see a 503 actually. When down: iWil:~ wschultz$ curl www.amazon.com HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable Server: NS_6.1 Content-Length:62 Connection: close iWil:~ wschultz$ wget -S www.amazon.com --12:21:26-- http://www.amazon.com/ => `index.html' Resolving www.amazon.com... 72.21.206.5 Connecting to www.amazon.com|72.21.206.5|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable Server: NS_6.1 Content-Length:62 Connection: close 12:21:26 ERROR 503: Service Unavailable. -wil On Jun 6, 2008, at 11:40 AM, Kevin Day wrote:
On Jun 6, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Lasher, Donn wrote:Checked, and doublechecked, not just me www.amazon.com returns: Http/1.1 Service UnavailableAnyone have a URL for a network/etc status page, or info on the outage?Been that way for a while this morning. -donnEven worse, the page they're displaying is actually a HTTP 200 response code(OK/no error), with no "Don't cache this" header - which means their error page is considered cacheable by some browsers/proxies. So, you may find users who tried to visit Amazon while they were down are still seeing it down long after they fix it.Lesson to high profile websites: add these to your error pages so you don't have people complaining you're still down long after you're fixed.* Don't return a 200 response code. Use 500 or 503. Nothing from 2xx or 4xx. * Add a "Cache-control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0" header, as well as an "Expires: 0" header for good measure. * If your server is really borked and you can't add headers at all, add '<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">' to the <head> section. That's not as good, but helps at least on the browser end. * If possible, add a timestamp to the page somewhere (even if it's in an HTML comment) so you can troubleshoot with users still seeing the error.-- Kevin
Current thread:
- Re: www.Amazon.com down?, (continued)
- Re: www.Amazon.com down? Jay R. Ashworth (Jun 06)
- Re: www.Amazon.com down? David Coulson (Jun 06)
- Re: www.Amazon.com down? Jay Hennigan (Jun 06)
- Re: www.Amazon.com down? Michele Neylon (Jun 06)
- Re: www.Amazon.com down? Jon Kibler (Jun 06)
- How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?) Kevin Day (Jun 06)
- RE: How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?) Andy Litzinger (Jun 06)
- Re: How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?) Bjorn Townsend (Jun 06)
- RE: How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?) Fred Reimer (Jun 06)
- Re: How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?) Tuc at T-B-O-H.NET (Jun 06)
- Re: How not to make an error page (was: OT: www.Amazon.com down?) Wil Schultz (Jun 06)
- Re: OT: www.Amazon.com down? Jay Hennigan (Jun 06)
- Re: OT: www.Amazon.com down? Marc Manthey (Jun 06)