Mudcat Internal Server Error. What is it?

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What is it?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 13 May 19 - 03:54 PM

And much of the reason is that Mudcat was wonky over the weekend, but seems to be much better now. We in the rural world of turtle-slow Internet suffer far more than many of you (I'm grateful when it's 2.5 Mbps.), but it's nice living here in the mountains.
Thanks for the reboot, Max.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: DaveRo
Date: 13 May 19 - 01:09 PM

GUEST,Some bloke wrote: have Chrome on my iMac, not because its better in any way than Safari but certain propriety websites won't work in Safari.

Reasons for include:

1. Safari is slow to support modern web technologies, much slower than Chrome and Firefox.

2 Chrome makes changes to its own websites, such as gmail, that breaks other browsers. Both Mozilla and Microsoft have accused them of doing it, and Microsoft's recent adoption of Chrome's browser engine has been influenced by it.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: DMcG
Date: 13 May 19 - 12:50 PM

I didn't say that, somebloke. But there is no value in debating this. Mudcat is what it is, and the opening question was about what the message means and does anyone know how to overcome the problem. That's what I answered.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: GUEST,Some bloke
Date: 13 May 19 - 12:31 PM

So by using RFC2616 protocol it can translate between string lengths so your system can handle it. "Translate" is the term I used as non tech people pissed off with the site always down may be reading and this is an accurate way to describe it without going into data path widths.

DMcG just said that by using this system to translate, it doesn't need to translate.

mmm. I think there was something about misinformation too. Clearly.

Out of interest, I mentioned iPhone 5s as this was the first 64 bit iPhone and iOS updates cannot handle anything earlier because they decided all code was to be 64 bit to avoid what DmC reckons isn't an issue "in the least." Whilst this is concerned with programming around the processor, it does show that squashing and expanding is needed. Web browsers are updating all the time with less legacy support to avoid bottlenecks.

Protocols are supposed to overcome different platform architecture limitations but they don't, never have and never will. I have Chrome on my iMac, not because its better in any way than Safari but certain propriety websites won't work in Safari. if RFC2616 did what it said on the tin, this would not be an issue.

My point stands. In 2019, even the appearance of Mudcat.org never mind the steam traction engine pulling it is not fit for the excellent purpose it serves, and the downtime clearly demonstrates this.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: DMcG
Date: 13 May 19 - 12:14 PM

I agree, Reinhard, that would be how I would do it as well. I simply meant something could be cached in my browser which was affecting things.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: Reinhard
Date: 13 May 19 - 11:58 AM

DaveRo: SomeBloke spoke of *legacy* 16 bit translators. That doesn't sound like Unicode which is quite modern.

DMcG: Switching from http to https is usually done on behalf of a redirect reply from the web server; at least it's what I do on my web servers.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: DaveRo
Date: 13 May 19 - 11:29 AM

I suspect Some Bloke might have been referring to the handling of Unicode double-byte (16bit) characters, which has been problematic here, rather than the machine architecture or the operating system mode. Just guessing.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: DMcG
Date: 13 May 19 - 10:57 AM

Some autotext 'corrections' in that I see, like 'comment' instead of 'connect', but I hope it is understandable.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: DMcG
Date: 13 May 19 - 10:51 AM

There is a fair amount of misleading information above, so I will attempt to give a more technically complete answer than I did before.

The HTTP protocol is based on a definition technically called RFC2616. This is specifically designed so that operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows, etc) and word size (64, 32, 16, 8 ..) do not matter in the least. In fact, the whole purpose of the internet protocols is to allow dissimilar computers to communicate effectively. I have used it with 24 bit architectures with 6 bit bits, for example, and defunct operating systems like VAX/VMS.   Moreover, it is a standard: the age of the implementation does not inherently matter, though it can do in some respects. For example, if I try to comment to 'The Independent' web site from my iPad mini, they have made the whole website so complex it frequently times out because the iPad cannot cope with how long things are taking, so assumes the server has gone away. But it is 'old consumers' of the data where this is likely to be a problem, not 'old providers'.

My experience is that when I try to connect to http://mudcat.org something switches it to https://mudcat.org. Whether this switch happens in my browser or the server I have not experimented enough to determine. Internal errors, for me, occur when I try to connect to 'https://mudcat.org' but not to 'http://awe.mudcat.org'. That suggests one of two possible sources. Either the security management is having trouble, or the load sharing mechanism that is trying to allocate 'mudcat.org' to a specific server is having a problem.

https establishes a session. It is possible - I say no more than that - that it partially established a session and then failed, and subsequent requests are attempting to use that same faultly partial session and so also failing. But it could be something else entirely.

So as I said originally, it is something that Max may be able to fix, or may have more information in server logs that tell him more precisely what is going on. It is not for us, as consumers of the data, can resolve. All we can do is use a workaround. By avoiding https and using http, and explicitly selecting the server (awe) things seem to work most of the time.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: Jeri
Date: 13 May 19 - 09:10 AM

I think it would be necessary to see what was in the post you were trying to make, as in copy & paste it in here, or somewhere. It sounds, at a guess, as if you were trying to link to something in a way that wasn't working.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: GUEST,Some bloke
Date: 13 May 19 - 07:20 AM

Mudcat has a medieval web interface that doesn't work seamlessly across the servers. (The name of the server you are on appears at the side of the logo at the top of the page.)

If you use OS X, iPhone 5s onwards, an Android phone less than four years old or Windows 64 bit and built in browsers, it has to invoke legacy 16 bit translators to be able to see it in a 64 bit system. I'm surprised when it does work to be honest.

Luckily, I didn't chip in when donations were given to change it for something from the twenty first century. I wonder what happened??

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: GUEST,Kenny B ( Inactive)
Date: 13 May 19 - 07:15 AM

There is a school of thought that its a plot by the mods to take the heat out of "the far side of the pond" posters contributions by giving them time to proof read and contemplate the comprehension of their posts, if this is correct I applaud them for their ingenuity but sometimes you cant teach a pig to sing …. c'est la vie say the old folks you know you never can tell

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: GeoffLawes
Date: 13 May 19 - 06:10 AM

And yet this new thread was accepted????

Subject: RE: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: DMcG
Date: 13 May 19 - 04:56 AM

Unless you are Max, it simply means you can't get to Mudcat that route. It may tell him something what exactly is going wrong and how to fix it, but for users of the site, it just means "sorry, unavailable."

A lot of us use http://awe.mudcat.org when that happens, which is often available.

Subject: Mudcat Internal Server Error. What i it?
From: GeoffLawes
Date: 13 May 19 - 04:35 AM

Over the last two days I have been trying to start a new thread on Mudcat but each of the 9 times that I have tried to make the post I have been unsuccessful and the computer says
“500 - Internal server error.
There is a problem with the resource you are looking for,and it cannot be displayed.”
What does this mean and does anyone know how to overcome the problem? (Lets see if i get the same computer response to this.)