www.spamcop.net unavailable?

[DavidT]

Here's an Akamai URL that describes the technology being used for SpamCop:

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/edgesuite.html

DT

[Wazoo]

Here's an Akamai URL that describes the technology being used for SpamCop:

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/edgesuite.html

True, but that is a demonstration/explanation/advertising page that talks about how wonderful things work ... I found no page dealing with outages, problems, etc. .. and as seen those many years back when I first started trying to track down who this Akamai stuff was that started showing up in my browser logs, they still don't seem to answer e-mail.

[A.J.Mechelynck]

Here's an Akamai URL that describes the technology being used for SpamCop:

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/edgesuite.html

DT

22979[/snapback]

AFAICT it's just "sales hype" with no technical content -- and to boot, it's not text but speech, and you can't use it without QuickTime

...and I couldn't get it without IE either, in Mozilla Firefox it just waited forever at the "loading" stage; so this confirms my impression that Akamai is not using Mozilla-compatible content on its web pages.

(Could it be the "Adblock" extension? If it would, then it should hurt other spamfighters besides just myself...)

[DavidT]

and to boot, it's not text but speech, and you can't use it without QuickTime

I think it's actually done in Flash, not QuickTime.

...and I couldn't get it without IE either, in Mozilla Firefox it just waited forever at the "loading" stage; so this confirms my impression that Akamai is not using Mozilla-compatible content on its web pages.

Sorry...it's working fine for me, using FireFox, so your premise is incorrect.

DT

[A.J.Mechelynck]

I think it's actually done in Flash, not QuickTime.

Well, when I opened that page I got a popup telling me that I had a version of QuickTime that was too old for the contents on this page, and linking me to the Apple QuickTime website for an update.

Sorry...it's working fine for me, using FireFox, so your premise is incorrect.

DT

22991[/snapback]

Well, there must be "something" to explain the difference. Some missing plugin in FF? Some extension, blocking needed behaviour? Norton Worm Protection not knowing that FF must access the Internet? I don't know. What I do know is that IE talked to me in American with Akamai sales hype and that FF got locked "loading".

[DavidT]

Well, when I opened that page I got a popup telling me that I had a version of QuickTime that was too old for the contents on this page, and linking me to the Apple QuickTime website for an update.

That's pretty strange, given that when I point at the "see how it works" link, the URL is a java scri_pt window command with this URL:

/en/html/services/es_hiw_flashtest.html

which, if successful, takes you to:

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/es_how_it_works.html

which has an embedded "swf" (Flash) file. If your computer is failing the "flashtest" then you've got some local issues that aren't the fault of the Akamai site.

DT

[A.J.Mechelynck]

That's pretty strange, given that when I point at the "see how it works" link, the URL is a java scri_pt window command with this URL:

/en/html/services/es_hiw_flashtest.html

which, if successful, takes you to:

http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/es_how_it_works.html

which has an embedded "swf" (Flash) file. If your computer is failing the "flashtest" then you've got some local issues that aren't the fault of the Akamai site.

DT

22997[/snapback]

I could explain that by imagining that I have both Flash and QT installed, but that QT was installed later and took over some or all of the file extensions and/or MIME types originally attributed to Flash. But anyway -- that "How it works" page is all sales hype AFAICT, I've heard it once in IE, and I don't need a repeat, thank you.

[Wazoo]

Another shot taken:

Second request for help/information.  As stated in the request yeterday, I am asking about where to go to find something valid to possibly explain why some folks cannot connect to a www.spamcop.net website that is using the services of Akamai.  Referenced yesterfay were discussions found at http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3425 and http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3288 ... Also stated yesterday was that I am a Moderator for that Forum and as you can see, just one of the folks involved trying to "guess" at what the actual problem may be.  The successful message yesterday included the comments "an Akamai representative will contact you within a few hours" .... It's been more than a few at this point with no response.

Crammed into a form box, all word-wrapping stripped ... (and I see I was a bit off on the time-frame...)

Again, got a screen that states:

Thank You

Message received

Thank you for your interest in Akamai. You will be contacted shortly by a member of the Akamai Team.

[Wazoo]

OK, no analysis at this point, just a quick read ... I don't think the actual 'problem' has been addressed, but pushing this up the chain .. just letting everyone else have a shot at the answers porvided at this point ....

Hello C.W.,

I am Shin MICHIMUKO from Akamai Cusotmer Care. I couldn't find your

previous e-mail, but let me answer your question.

The discussion of the thread 3288:

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3288

only shows the 408 error which can be easily reproduced, when you don't

send the valid HTTP request within 30 seconds to the server. If you send

the valid request to the same servers, then you will get the response

correctly.

So we need to discuss about what is happening in 3425:

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3425

'Invalid URL

The requested URL, "/", is invalid'

This message is displayed when the host header is not correctly

requested by the browser. You can easily reproduce this by using

"www.spamcop.com" to the same web server (194.78.133.224), like this:

------------------------------------------

$ telnet 194.78.133.224 80

Trying 194.78.133.224...

Connected to 194.78.133.224.

Escape character is '^]'.

GET / HTTP/1.0

Host: www.spamcop.com

HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request

Server: AkamaiGHost

Mime-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 132

Expires: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 10:32:17 GMT

Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 10:32:17 GMT

Connection: close

<HTML><HEAD>

<TITLE>Invalid URL</TITLE>

</HEAD><BODY>

<H1>Invalid URL</H1>

The requested URL "/", is invalid.<p>

</BODY></HTML>

Connection closed by foreign host.

------------------------------------------

I guessed that this end user (Tony?) had just directly accessed

194.78.133.224 without the correct host header.

I was sorry for late response, but it might be because that we are

providing the support only for our customers directly. The previous

e-mail could be ignored since it might not come from our customer's

account, and we cannot respond to the person who cannot come from other

companies than our customers. Could you contact the webmaster at

spamcop.com? You can forward to the person with this e-mail, of course.

  Probably we should get the accurate information through the company,

and they know how to troubleshoot when they get this kind of the

complaint (we usually need the client IP, DNS server address, and the

time of the error too).

Anyway, I hope my above explanation helps you understanding the situation.

Best Regards,

==================== Akamai Technologies Inc. =====

Shin MICHIMUKO. <redacted>

Support URL (Tier-1 diagnostics): http://support.akamai.com/

==== 24/7 CCare Tel: +1-877-425-2832 ================================

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Wazoo

> Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 1:47 AM

> To: webmaster[at]akamai.com

> Subject: Message from www.akamai.com visitor

>

> message:  Second request for help/information.  As stated in the request

> yeterday, I am asking about where to go to find something valid to

> possibly explain why some folks cannot connect to a www.spamcop.net

> website that is using the services of Akamai.  Referenced yesterfay were

> discussions found at

> http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3425 and

> http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=3288 ... Also stated

> yesterday was that I am a Moderator for that Forum and as you can see,

> just one of the folks involved trying to "guess" at what the actual

> problem may be.  The successful message yesterday included the comments

> "an Akamai representative will contact you within a few hours" .... It's

> been more than a few at this point with no response.

[A.J.Mechelynck]

Hi Wazoo, thanks for your trouble.

I tried once to access spamcop by number (a method which has worked in the past but I guess that was before SC was "Akamaized") but it got me nowhere and I soon desisted.

Here is the problem as I see it now, every time; and I try to describe it as clearly as I can.

Let's say I have Mozilla Firefox open with several tabs; one of these displays the browser's version information, with just "about:" as the URL or pseudo-URL (like "about:blank" displays a blank page in all the browsers where I've tried it). (Any other URL instead of "about:" gives the same results but this is easiest to reproduce).

Now I type "http://www.spamcop.net/"'>http://www.spamcop.net/" (without the quotes, and with the slash at the end) into the URL bar, and after that I hit the Enter key (and, I repeat, it's www.spamcop.net and not .com).

The tab title changes to "Loading" (with a "tab throbber") for a few seconds, during which the status bar says first something which disappears too fast and then "Waiting for www.spamcop.net"; then (after a few seconds and not after the much longer "timeout" characteristic of an unattainable or unresolvable address) the tab title again shows "About:", the status bar says "Done", and the displayed contents of the tab haven't changed.

Another experiment: after submitting spam by mail and getting the usual Autoresponder email, I open it in Mozilla Thunderbird and click one if its "Tracking URLs" (you know, http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=blah-blah-blah-blah-blah). Mozilla Firefox (my default browser) immediately opens a new tab with a uniformly grey background; that new tab says "Loading" for a few seconds, and then "(Untitled)" once the status bar stabilizes on "Done". The tab contents remain uniformly grey with nothing displayed. No error popup, no error message, nothing.

All the while, if I browse to the same URL (http://www.spamcop.net/) using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 instead, everything goes fine, I get the SC welcome page and, if I have queued spam, I can process it with "Report now", "Skip to reports", "Send reports now" and repeat as many times as necessary.

My Firefox memory cache is diasbled, and even rebooting and clearing the disk cache, changes nothing to the above behaviour. I am loath to click the button "Clear all" because it indeed clears everything including not only the cache but also all history, cookies and remembered passwords.

Dating from when I noticed the word "Firefox" at the bottom of the SC welcome page and decided to try it, I have got hooked on it, and now I use it for everything other than Windows Update (and, recently, the Spamcop Parsing and Reporting Service). Firefox is not perfect (what is?), it is a memory hog and requires periodic restart to reclaim wasted memory, but even so I like it much more than any other browser I've tried including its nearest cousin, Netscape 7.

So I don't like it but I can stand it, I'm not completely blocked.

[Wazoo]

all that "about: blank" stuff ... long history on the IE side of things ... though installed and used a few times, I haven't made the conversion yet, thus haven't been digging around the issues/problems on FireFox ... I was going to say (and admit to even typing in) that I would do some of that later on tonight ... but I'll be honest <g> ... the new install of this Forum app has my current focus .. for example, I recall that one feature of buying the thing was spell-checking availability ... I'm still looking for that <g> ....

Not ignoring your query, just advising that I'm doing other stuff right now .. and besides ... I've got to be nice and let Don/Deputies/Julian take a shot at working on this before I figure it out, right? (and if you believe that .... <G>)

[A.J.Mechelynck]

[...]Not ignoring your query, just advising that I'm doing other stuff right now .. and besides ... I've got to be nice and let Don/Deputies/Julian take a shot at working on this before I figure it out, right? (and if you believe that .... <G>)

23225[/snapback]

About you being temporarily "doing other stuff" -- that's OK. There are only 24 hours in a day and there's only one of you, right? I can wait, but hopefully not forever.

About Don/Deputies/Julian: I wrote to Don about this problem, asking for help if any. His answer was just that "nothing has changed on the SC side." AFAICT (let's hope I'm wrong) he's treating it like what Bugzilla would call "RESOLVED WORKSFORME" -- IYSWIM.

[StevenUnderwood]

To be fair, I have not seen any evidence that this is a problem for anyone but you, including others using similiar software. I'm NOT saying there is not a problem, only that almost any little glitch in spamcop usually brings out many complaints.

Have you been able to reproduce this on a different machine, perhaps from a different network? I once had a problem that turned out to be caused by the new firmware for my wireless router.

[Wazoo]

About you being temporarily "doing other stuff" -- that's OK. There are only 24 hours in a day and there's only one of you, right?

And a number of folks would say "Thank God for that!" <g>

About Don/Deputies/Julian: I wrote to Don about this problem, asking for help if any. His answer was just that "nothing has changed on the SC side." AFAICT (let's hope I'm wrong) he's treating it like what Bugzilla would call "RESOLVED WORKSFORME" -- IYSWIM.

That's a rough one. Don was one of the first paid 'ermployees' .. primarily to handle the administrative things to free up Julian's time. I can tell you that he does hit the newsgroups every now and then, has been seen in here once in a while .. but providing technical support is not the main part of his job. Almost all of his posts "here" are as a result of my asking for his help amd/or additional input (again, I'm not part of that inner circle) ... I know for a fact that the flow of e-mail to his InBox never slows down .. and this is also true of the Deputies -- using a shared InBox there so they can all reach n and grab some <g> ... but there are tons of people that can't figure out how to use NNTP, some paranoid about posting into a Forum for the world to see .... so even though answers and help are available, it's e-mail to the Deputies ....shouldn't have to try to exlain Julian's focus <g> Then you have this wierd guy that just doesn't like not knowing the answer, so tends to spend way too much time chasing after wierd facts <g> ....

But, as Steven has stated, and to build on that, just look at the folks I've ticked off just in the last month, basically pointing out the same thing .... out of thousands of users, there is just one that's got a complaint. That's what makes it hard to troubleshoot from "here" .. it's easy to point out that it's almost got to be at "that" end of the connection, but I'd personally like to be able to say "go here and change this ..." That's just me .. and definitely no guarantee I can come up with the answers ...

And with that on the table, got to head "over there" and catch up on all the e-mails and PMs that have started popping in/up .. JT's back <g>

[A.J.Mechelynck]

To be fair, I have not seen any evidence that this is a problem for anyone but you, including others using similiar software.  I'm NOT saying there is not a problem, only that almost any little glitch in spamcop usually brings out many complaints.

If I knew, or could find out, anything on my machine that might be causing this behaviour, be sure I'd correct it immediately. I'm not saying it's not me, just that it's way over my skills.

Have you been able to reproduce this on a different machine, perhaps from a different network?  I once had a problem that turned out to be caused by the new firmware for my wireless router.

23233[/snapback]

I have only this machine, only this connection, no LAN, no outside job, so I can't test it elsewhere. And I don't know what to look for that might cause this problem in Firefox (I just checked that it still happens there) and not in Internet Explorer. All I can tell is that, IIRC, I think I installed Norton SystemWorks 2005 about a day or two before the problem started appearing; and all other "well-behaved" sites (i.e., not relying on ActiveX like WindowsUpdate does) display correctly in Firefox, including my "home" site, my "art" site, Vim, SourceForge, Mozilla, Bugzilla, and more, even all four "SpamCop statistic" histograms -- but these are on alpha.cesmail.net (which my DNS server resolves distinctly as 216.154.195.37 at the moment) and not on www.spamcop.net (which resolves as an alias for some akamai router in Belgium, currently 194.78.133.224, which according to the SC parser is in skynet.be address space).

[A.J.Mechelynck]

(No change in 3 months, see http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?...indpost&p=23711 )

I still cannot reach http://www.spamcop.net/ using the Mozilla Firefox browser advertised at the bottom of the SC frontpage (I'm currently using "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3"). I can reach SC with both Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7.2. However, from where I sit, www.spamcop.net resolves to 194.78.133.222, which SpamCop sees as a Skynet.be address (entering that dotted-quad into the parse box answers with abuse[at]skynet.be as the abuse address).

I just noticed that Skynet technical addresses like http://selfcare.skynet.be/ exhibit the same symptoms: it can be reached with IE6 or NS7 but not with Firefox 1.0.3 (with Firefox, entering either the SC addy or the selfcare addy into the URL bar and then hitting Enter, gives "Done" in the status bar after about 1 second, but the previously displayed page remains unchanged).

I have just filed a problem report with Skynet but I'm not very confident in their ability to solve such an "outlandish" (for them) problem. I have not (yet?) filed a bug report at Bugzilla because I'm not sure how to formulate the problem in Mozilla language, and because I expect that Mozilla gurus will see this as a problem with the sites in question and not as a problem with Mozilla Firefox.

I suspect that the bug lies with an Akamai server hosted by Skynet and/or with a redirecting page or pages on a Skynet server or servers. I don't expect anything to come out of this but should something positive happen, I'll keep you posted.

[Wazoo]

OK, here's what I've got for now ...

SamSpade for Windows

04/20/05 19:29:01 Browsing http://194.78.133.222/

Fetching http://194.78.133.222/ ...

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: 194.78.133.222

Connection: close

User-Agent: Sam Spade 1.14

HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request

Server: AkamaiGHost

Mime-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 132

Expires: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:29:02 GMT

Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:29:02 GMT

Connection: close

<HTML><HEAD>

<TITLE>Invalid URL</TITLE>

</HEAD><BODY>

<H1>Invalid URL</H1>

The requested URL "/", is invalid.<p>

</BODY></HTML>

Weird, don't recall this ...

C:\>ping www.spamcop.net

Pinging a369.g.akamai.net [63.215.124.193] with 32 bytes of data:

04/20/05 19:27:47 Browsing http://63.215.124.193

Fetching http://63.215.124.193/ ...

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: 63.215.124.193

Connection: close

User-Agent: Sam Spade 1.14

HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request

Server: AkamaiGHost

Mime-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 132

Expires: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:27:49 GMT

Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:27:49 GMT

Connection: close

<HTML><HEAD>

<TITLE>Invalid URL</TITLE>

</HEAD><BODY>

<H1>Invalid URL</H1>

The requested URL "/", is invalid.<p>

</BODY></HTML>

So it appears nailing it via the IP is out ....

Firewall log to the default www.spamcop.net page (no cookie involved)

Info 4/20/05 19:40:42.446 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/beware.png

Info 4/20/05 19:40:42.066 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/large.css

Info 4/20/05 19:40:42.066 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/05logo.png

Info 4/20/05 19:40:41.571 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/xlarge.css

Info 4/20/05 19:40:41.571 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/small.css

Info 4/20/05 19:40:41.286 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/scri_pt.js

Info 4/20/05 19:40:41.281 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/xsmall.css

Info 4/20/05 19:40:40.911 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/05look.css

Info 4/20/05 19:40:37.356 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/images/favicon.ico

Info 4/20/05 19:40:35.112 URL Logging http://www.spamcop.net/

Probably not much help, but I'm seeing more and more comments on issues with FireFox 1.03 and display issues (though noting that these are tlaking about the handling of CSS code and the 'movement' of page data/contents, not a blank page)

[A.J.Mechelynck]

OK, here's what I've got for now ...

[...]

Probably not much help, but I'm seeing more and more comments on issues with FireFox 1.03 and display issues (though noting that these are tlaking about the handling of CSS code and the 'movement' of page data/contents, not a blank page)

26724[/snapback]

AFAICT, nothing has changed in this respect since Fx 1.0 release. Spoofing the NS 7.2 user-agent string doesn't help. The page is not exactly blank but null (it doesn't clear whatever was in the same tab before).

[turetzsr]

...FF 1.03 here, as well, but having absolutely no problems with http://www.spamcop.net/.

[A.J.Mechelynck]

...FF 1.03 here, as well, but having absolutely no problems with http://www.spamcop.net/.

26727[/snapback]

Huh-huh. I guess you get a different Akamai server. As I implied, I believe the ultimate guilty party is some skynet.be HTML programmer. I'll add here that AFAIK, Skynet EDP personnel (with the possible exception of those on FTP servers) specialize in M$ first; everything else comes after.

[DavidT]

Are you relying on your own ISP for your DNS? Mine got a bit flakey recently, so I've switched to using the ones found here:

http://support.open-rsc.org/.servers/

You can plug those into the config on your own PC and perhaps you'll have better luck.

DT

[A.J.Mechelynck]

Are you relying on your own ISP for your DNS? Mine got a bit flakey recently, so I've switched to useing the ones found here:

http://support.open-rsc.org/.servers/

You can plug those into the config on your own PC and perhaps you'll have better luck.

DT

26731[/snapback]

Yes. Belgacom Skynet SA/NV is a subsidiary of Belgacom, the formerly monopolistic telephone and telegraph operator in Belgium. Since symbolic addresses cannot be used for DNS servers, I use the dotted-quad addresses 195.238.2.22 and 195.238.2.21.

[A.J.Mechelynck]

Followup to http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?...indpost&p=26722

[...]

I suspect that the bug lies with an Akamai server hosted by Skynet and/or with a redirecting page or pages on a Skynet server or servers. I don't expect anything to come out of this but should something positive happen, I'll keep you posted.

26722[/snapback]

Well, here's the relevant part of Skynet's answer:

"There is nothing we can do at our level concerning your display problem of some pages via Mozilla. That browser is not supported by our services."

So nothing has come out of it, nor ever will.

Since SpamCop uses Akamai which (in Belgium) uses Skynet which explicitly does not support Firefox (which it regards as identical to Mozilla), I suggest the bottom line recommending Firefox on SC pages should be removed. I like that browser a lot but there are (ATM) three sites where I cannot use it: Windows Update, Skynet help and SpamCop.

[DavidT]

I use the dotted-quad addresses 195.238.2.22 and 195.238.2.21.

Please try using these instead and see if it solves your problem:

199.166.29.3

199.166.28.10

It will only take you a minute to test it.

DT

[DavidT]

"That browser is not supported by our services."

I think you're taking that standard tech support answer much too seriously. Just because an ISP doesn't officially support a given browser or email client, it doesn't mean that those programs are incompatible with their system or that you can't use them successfully. For years and years, many ISPs only "supported" Internet Explorer, but that's mostly laziness on their part, and the fact that many of their staff are Microsoft certified, so they don't want to bother with knowing anything about other software.

DT