[wiki] http 403

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 8:09 AM,  <matthias.hinkfoth2 at uni-rostock.de> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> sometimes (?) I have a problem loading a specific page:
>
> user at host:~$ wget --spider https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSSL
> Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
> --2016-02-15 16:45:18--  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSSL
> Resolving help.ubuntu.com (help.ubuntu.com)... 91.189.89.239, 91.189.90.250
> Connecting to help.ubuntu.com (help.ubuntu.com)|91.189.89.239|:443... connected.
> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
> Length: unspecified [text/html]
> Remote file exists and could contain further links,
> but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.
>
> user at host:~$ wget --spider https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSSL
> Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
> --2016-02-15 16:45:56--  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSSL
> Resolving help.ubuntu.com (help.ubuntu.com)... 91.189.90.250, 91.189.89.239
> Connecting to help.ubuntu.com (help.ubuntu.com)|91.189.90.250|:443... connected.
> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
> Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!
>
> Seems that 91.189.90.250 does not give me access, whereas 91.189.89.239
> does.

Although inconsistent, this is pretty typical behavior for the
community help wiki. It uses a high level of caching and blocking of
crawling because the version of the software it's running wasn't
really built to scale in the way that it has. So you end up with some
weird edge cases like this.

There have been proposals over the years to switch from away MoinMoin
and to MediaWiki or some other wiki software that scales better, but
that's a pretty massive undertaking.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2