Bad Gateway...

kaspaas · Mar 25, 2004

I'm getting sick and tired of reading messages like below.

Earlier today even www.news24.com returned the same message.

What is going on at Telkom?

The week started with the POP3 service not working.
Now there is serious problems with the "transparent proxy" no-one may bypass.

Worst is they tell you to contact the Administrator, but don't give any contact details. Support knows nothing about this problem, or so they claim. I'm apparently the idiot.[

!]

Best Effort Service South Africa can take pride in!

Bad Gateway
The following error occurred:

Code:

 The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is not found by retrying the URL. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please contact the administrator.

South Africa needs World Class Broadband at World Competitive Prices.

Karnaugh · Mar 25, 2004

errr, that looks like your own Proxy is giving that error ? :/

I haven't seen a problem at all eh. "Now there is serious problems with the "transparent proxy" no-one may bypass." can bypass it just fine [

]

<hr noshade size="1">
Very funny Scotty. Now beam down my pants!!

martin · Mar 26, 2004

Care to share how? I regularly get gateway timeouts on http://www.blogs.com and subdomains and I'm starting to suspect it's the proxy.

antowan · Mar 26, 2004

I have run into little glitches like this before. Very interested to see how many people respond....

He who does not understand the value of war at the right time, cannot comprehend the value of life at any time - Anonymous

martin · Mar 31, 2004

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by martin
 Care to share how? I regularly get gateway timeouts on http://www.blogs.com and subdomains and I'm starting to suspect it's the proxy.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">

Can anyone with an ADSL line get onto this site? ( http://www.blogs.com ). I've been getting gateway timeouts on only this site for the past 3 days.

Andre · Mar 31, 2004

Same here.

martin · Mar 31, 2004

Anyone know why this is happening or how to remedy this?

martin · Apr 2, 2004

I am at a loss to explain this. I still had trouble connecting to blogs.com (Gateway Timeout). Tried and failed again and then a few seconds later I did a tracert to blogs.com for interest's sake, tried the site again and all of a sudden I could connect to the site? [?]

Solar · Apr 11, 2004

I'd also like to know how to bypass the transparent proxy.. I can't see any obvious way to do it.

caroper · Apr 11, 2004

Try using dsl-cache.saix.net as your proxy It has solved some problems in the past.

Cheers
Chris

BTTB · Apr 11, 2004

I can view blogs No Problem.
I dont run any proxies at all.

<hr noshade size="1">You can take Telkom out of the Post Office but you can't take the Post Office out of Telkom.

DFantom · May 20, 2004

try setting your DNS settings to manual rather than dynamic DNS.

Karnaugh · May 20, 2004

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I'd also like to know how to bypass the transparent proxy.. I can't see any obvious way to do it.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">

Ever thought of tunneling your HTTP to a machine that isnt behind a trans proxy on a port other than 80

- Colin Alston
colin at alston dot za dot org

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett

podo · May 20, 2004

I should clarify here,

As far as I understand, there isn't "A" transparent proxy, but rather, a whole fleet of transparent proxies.

It seems, each DSLAM is equipped with its own Netcache box. This is to make it seem fast for popular downloads even though most DSLAMs only have a 2mbps connection to SAIX (meaning it can serve 4 users at the full 512kbps, no more)

It appears that some proxies start giving trouble from time to time, but not all of them. That's why the problems will appear to be phantom, but it _IS_ the Telkom proxies causing the trouble.

The bizarre traceroute/ping and then connect scenario martin wrote about is a real possibility here. Normally, when Netcache says "GATEWAY_TIMEOUT", it means, it can't reach the remote host. If you ping/traceroute and a host which should be there, isn't, it might entice the nearest Telkom Cisco router to re-check its BGP status and find that a route it is using might be down. It should then switch to a different route (they all have them, for redundancy) which will fix the problem.

Setting up a connection to a proxy manually, not on port 80, will fix the problem. You'll need your own proxy though, or access to somebody else's.

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development

Karnaugh · May 21, 2004

uuh

There isnt "A" transparent proxy, more like about 4 of them at the larger exchanges.

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">even though most DSLAMs only have a 2mbps connection to SAIX (meaning it can serve 4 users at the full 512kbps, no more)<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">

Uh.. thats rather inacurate, where exactly did you get that figure of 2Mb from?

- Colin Alston
colin at alston dot za dot org

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett

Flippit · May 21, 2004

I get it too:

Bad Gateway
The following error occurred:

Code:

 The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is not found by retrying the URL. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please contact the administrator. 


I don't know that much about proxies and stuff - can someone explain again what to do?

<font size="3"><font face="Comic Sans MS"><font color="red">F</font id="red"><font color="orange">l</font id="orange"><font color="limegreen">i</font id="limegreen"><font color="green">p</font id="green"><font color="blue">p</font id="blue"><font color="purple">i</font id="purple"><font color="navy">t</font id="navy"></font id="Comic Sans MS"></font id="size3">

kaspaas · May 21, 2004

The major problem is that Telkom does not identify the Proxy server with a NAME, neither do they provide the contact details of the admistrators, and they don't educate ALL their helpdesk operators what a proxy server is, and that everybody is indeed routed via a proxy.

Help desk is still a Russian Roulette issue - two real life examples below.

<many ages of "your call is important to us...">
Ring-ring - Good day how may I assist you today with excellent service.

Well, I'm using ADSL and can't access the web....
(rude interrupt) Have you rebooted you PC? And your modem?

Allow me to tell the problem - the Telkom Proxy server is not working.

Sorry sir, but at Telkom we don't use proxies...

May I please speak to your supervisor?

Sorry sir, but you may not speak to my supervisor. Please tell me what your problem is....

Why may I not speak to your supervisor?

Because you have not told me you problem sir.

But I told you what my problem is!

But I told you Telkom has no plonksie servers sir - so you can't have a problem.
<hr noshade size="1">

A week later after ages of "your call is important to us..."

Hi, whats your problem?

Your transparent proxies arn't working.

What is your telephone number sir?

01.....

Thanks sir, I'll report it, and it should be fine soon. In the mean time set your browser to use ...... as proxy. Do you know how to do this, or should I talk you through?

Thanks a lot - I've set it already - seems to work!

Please note: The polite operator could provide excellent service. The rude one could!

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by Flippit
 I get it too:

Bad Gateway
The following error occurred:

Code:

 The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is not found by retrying the URL. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please contact the administrator. 


I don't know that much about proxies and stuff - can someone explain again what to do?

<font size="3"><font face="Comic Sans MS"><font color="red">F</font id="red"><font color="orange">l</font id="orange"><font color="limegreen">i</font id="limegreen"><font color="green">p</font id="green"><font color="blue">p</font id="blue"><font color="purple">i</font id="purple"><font color="navy">t</font id="navy"></font id="Comic Sans MS"></font id="size3">
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

South Africa needs World Class Broadband at World Competitive Prices.

Flippit · May 21, 2004

Okay, so I phoned Telkom, he asked for the Client IP address, which he said was right, then I told him about what you guys had told me (proxy to dsl-cache.saix.net) and he said to try port 8080 instead of the 80 I was using (I am a n00b to proxies). Very helpful guy - I had expected much worse from all the horror stories that come out here, but his solution was for me to type in my links instead of clicking on them... uh... no... It is working sometimes, but not always. Strange...

Flippit

Andre · May 21, 2004

This bad gateway thing seems to be especially bad today. One moment I'm browsing a web forum and the next moment it's gone.

It seems to be DNS related. If you ping the site in question and paste the IP into a browser it works again.

plug · May 22, 2004

It's driving me nuts!!! HELP!

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