Strange problem on Eircom. Web pages not loading.

Brian h · 13-11-2012 2:22pm #1

Hi all,

My sister has an Eircom Broadband package—not sure which one—but in the last few days she has been experiencing a strange problem. If she enters a web address in the browser address bar, the web page just stay blank. If she uses Google search, the results show up immediately but when she clicks on a link, again the web page hangs and goes no further. Switching browsers does not help either and she gets the same result with Chrome, IE9 and Firefox.

I have also run CCleaner for her to clear the internet cache and temp files but it made no difference. She rang Eircom support who told her she might have a virus and to do a scan. She only has MS Security Essentials installed so she ran that but it found nothing. Her system is a four-year-old Dell desktop running Vista and I presume the standard Eircom broadband router.

I have run out of ideas that might help her so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help.

styo · 23-07-2013 11:02am

Brian h wrote: »

Hi all,

My sister has an Eircom Broadband package—not sure which one—but in the last few days she has been experiencing a strange problem. If she enters a web address in the browser address bar, the web page just stay blank. If she uses Google search, the results show up immediately but when she clicks on a link, again the web page hangs and goes no further. Switching browsers does not help either and she gets the same result with Chrome, IE9 and Firefox.

I have also run CCleaner for her to clear the internet cache and temp files but it made no difference. She rang Eircom support who told her she might have a virus and to do a scan. She only has MS Security Essentials installed so she ran that but it found nothing. Her system is a four-year-old Dell desktop running Vista and I presume the standard Eircom broadband router.

I have run out of ideas that might help her so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help.

I have a feeling that the problem is with eircom caching of web pages.

I get the same problem, intermittently, a good example of a page with frequent problems is www.rte.ie/news/.

if you try a telnet to port 80 and manually get the page, you sometimes get gzipped content and sometimes not. it seems to oscillate - one can repeat for a few seconds if a blank page is returned and often continue to get blank pages, and then things work again for a while...When you get zipped content, this tends to coincide with blank pages in the web browser...when pages returned are not zipped, this coincides with browser pages that work fine...note that the x-status lists page as cached in all cases and the cache server listed is always the same eircom server, that appears to be ones local exchange (thus I have obfuscated in these listings)

$ telnet www.rte.ie 80
Trying 147.255.171.5...
Connected to www.rte.ie.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /news/index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.rte.ie

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 10:41:06 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: brain/2.0
X-Status: cached-real.eircom.server.ip.here
Cache-Control: max-age=180, stale-if-error=3600, public
Expires: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 10:42:32 GMT
X-Server-Name: db
X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 15245
Accept-Ranges: bytes
X-Varnish: 432139981 432126791
X-Served-By: sqe.rte.ie
Age: 107
Connection: keep-alive, close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

x???_???&?9??4??U??M????V?T?]۔d????G' $?,H?X??/?֟1?s??]|ɍ?LR$E?T3]?I,????gd?Ç?_;ʎǁ`??s??۲?&?̍٫S???.;?vy?|e}???\G?s??8?
?W hw@{s?-
hx??e?U4??>$T<sfy?????}k??o1???~,?

and more of the same....

...and a working example....

$telnet www.rte.ie 80
Trying 147.255.171.5...
Connected to www.rte.ie.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /news/index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.rte.ie

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 10:44:22 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: brain/2.0
X-Status: cached-real.eircom.server.ip.here
Cache-Control: max-age=180, stale-if-error=3600, public
Expires: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 10:46:22 GMT
X-Server-Name: db
X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge
X-Varnish: 1119688084 1119668825
Age: 73
X-Served-By: sqc.rte.ie
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

<!doctype html>



 <html class="no-js" lang="ga" > 
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">

styo · 23-07-2013 11:13am

further to this - I spotted the following which suggests that safari has problems with zipping of web page content. probably a general problem with other browsers. from general reading, problem seems particularly acute with pages that are multimedia.

http://www.beetlebrow.co.uk/what-do-you-need/help-and-documentation/unix-tricks-and-information/safari-gzip-deflation-and-blank-pages

thing that is not clear to me is whether the deflation (zipping) is being performed by eircom (ie. serve page then deflate in cache for storage) or at particular site. I see this problem fairly regularly recently with pages from a variety of sources so I'm tempted to say that problem is unselective zipping of pages by eircom for storage - this might also explain periodic return of zipped and non zipped content - ie. a broken zipped page is cached periodically and one sometimes gets that returned but sometimes, when cache copy is expired, get a fresh working page. just a hypothesis as they say...

kaizersoze · 23-07-2013 11:38am

Try a different pc/laptop on the same modem.
Reset the modem.
Try a different modem.

styo · 23-07-2013 11:40am

kaizersoze wrote: »

Try a different pc/laptop on the same modem.
Reset the modem.
Try a different modem.

well past that level in my case kaizer

multiple browsers, multiple machines, multiple routers/modems, multiple resets....persistent problem..:(

kaizersoze · 23-07-2013 11:45am

styo wrote: »

well past that level in my case kaizer

multiple browsers, multiple machines, multiple routers/modems, multiple resets....persistent problem..:(

That was for the OP....:P

Spear · 23-07-2013 11:53am

styo wrote: »

I have a feeling that the problem is with eircom caching of web pages.

Eircom aren't caching any pages.

styo · 23-07-2013 12:01pm

"X-Status: cached-real.eircom.server.ip.here" ??

looks like caching to me.

can't imagine any ISP wouldn't transparently cache to reduce external bandwidth usage, but it's been a long time since I've messed about this low in the stack.

in any case, I've opened a ticket with eircom - we'll see what comes of it - i'll post here...

Spear · 23-07-2013 12:09pm

styo wrote: »

"X-Status: cached-real.eircom.server.ip.here" ??

looks like caching to me.

can't imagine any ISP wouldn't transparently cache to reduce external bandwidth usage, but it's been a long time since I've messed about this low in the stack.

in any case, I've opened a ticket with eircom - we'll see what comes of it - i'll post here...

Hmm, I'm actually wrong.

I don't know what that IP is, it's not RTEs and it's not what RTE resolves to.

When you ping/nslookup www.rte.ie where does it point to?

Have you explicitly set a proxy?

styo · 23-07-2013 12:16pm

Spear wrote: »

Hmm, I'm actually wrong.

I don't know what that IP is, it's not RTEs and it's not what RTE resolves to.

When you ping/nslookup www.rte.ie where does it point to?

Have you explicitly set a proxy?

:eek: sorry - didn't make myself clear - for privacy reasons I change the ip address. The original listing resolved to an eircom domain address of the form...

XX.XX.XX.XX-dynamic.b-ras1.pgs.LOCAL_EXCHANGE.eircom.net

No explicit proxy set. I've cleared arp and dns caches, the works...

I also think thery are using ngix as the proxy/web cache server, as it sometimes fails to deliver a page and one gets an ngix error page fairly consistently irrespective of what one tries to connect to. Could be individual site responses, but if it looks like a duck, and....

all fumbling in the dark of course... :rolleyes:

Spear · 23-07-2013 12:22pm

styo wrote: »

:eek: sorry - didn't make myself clear - for privacy reasons I change the ip address. The original listing resolved to an eircom domain address of the form...

XX.XX.XX.XX-dynamic.b-ras1.pgs.LOCAL_EXCHANGE.eircom.net

No explicit proxy set. I've cleared arp and dns caches, the works...

I also think thery are using ngix as the proxy/web cache server, as it sometimes fails to deliver a page and one gets an ngix error page fairly consistently irrespective of what one tries to connect to. Could be individual site responses, but if it looks like a duck, and....

all fumbling in the dark of course... :rolleyes:

But what does www.rte.ie resolve to for you? It shouldn't appear with that 147.255.171.5 address at all.

styo · 23-07-2013 12:59pm

Spear wrote: »

Hmm, I'm actually wrong.

When you ping/nslookup www.rte.ie where does it point to?

good call... :pac:

interesting...

so I use a DNS service that enables one to appear elsewhere in the world when one wants. It operates via DNS. Under normal operation DNS resolves normally , so I hadn't spotted a problem.

But on a selective basis one can opt to appear as if your traffic is comming from another country, as DNS resolves to their proxies. so I did a dig on rte both via service and @8.8.8.8 (google) and noticed a different set of ip addresses returned.

It just so happens that for whatever reason, www.rte.ie is one of those sites that it resolves to their own machines. I guess that there are lots of folks abroad who would liek to view rte content...

Now what I've noticed is that they consistently role ip address resolution around a chain of addresses, and through testing of each, noticed that one of their ip addresses resolves to a web proxy that returns empty content consistently, no matter what web page or what site one accesses via it. ie. it's broken.

so scratch my theorising - looks like it's this service causing the problem, periodically as that broken proxy rolls around to become the designate web server, and of course only for sites the service is deciding to proxy.

thanks for the help, bar something else emerging, looks like I'm sorted ...:)

Spear · 23-07-2013 1:16pm

So it was something akin to Hotspot Shield? It did seem to be inserting itself as an aggressive and non-transparent proxy. So my initial statement about Eircom was correct, but the proxy you have isn't handling the Accept-Content/Content-Type headers properly.

styo · 23-07-2013 1:27pm

Spear wrote: »

So it was something akin to Hotspot Shield? It did seem to be inserting itself as an aggressive and non-transparent proxy. So my initial statement about Eircom was correct, but the proxy you have isn't handling the Accept-Content/Content-Type headers properly.

not quite(i think

) - as far as I can tell, eircom are proxying and are caching (and maybe deflating).

so the path appears to be

browser --> service DNS

browser -->eircom proxy-->service proxy[one of a set of]-->www.rte.ie

the problem, so far as I can tell, turns out to be orthogonal to whatever eircom are doing - the point is that for my setup a DNS resolution for www.rte.ie ocassionally resolves for me to a broken proxy server from that service. ie. 9 times out of 10 everything works fine, but once in a while I happen to try to open a site they are proxying just when this specific server is the resoluton end point. I think what happens is that my browser then tries to fetch the page from that ip address, get an 200 OK but empty page. Eircom might even be caching that page. browsers no doubt cache this page. And all made a little more complex by DNS caching and DNS pre-fetching, but I disabled this, which made it easier to spot. :pac:

deflating appears to be orthogonal (so I was wrong about that I think), the problem being a periodic return to a broken service proxy. when that broken proxy is the DNS end point then blank page.

anyway, still a theory

. I'll post here once various tickets have been responded to.

intersting example in any case.

styo · 23-07-2013 1:36pm

styo wrote: »

not quite(i think ) - as far as I can tell, eircom are proxying and are caching (and maybe deflating).

so the path appears to be

browser --> service DNS

browser -->eircom proxy-->service proxy[one of a set of]-->www.rte.ie

the problem, so far as I can tell, turns out to be orthogonal to whatever eircom are doing - the point is that for my setup a DNS resolution for www.rte.ie ocassionally resolves for me to a broken proxy server from that service. ie. 9 times out of 10 everything works fine, but once in a while I happen to try to open a site they are proxying just when this specific server is the resoluton end point. I think what happens is that my browser then tries to fetch the page from that ip address, get an 200 OK but empty page. Eircom might even be caching that page. browsers no doubt cache this page. And all made a little more complex by DNS caching and DNS pre-fetching, but I disabled this, which made it easier to spot. :pac:

deflating appears to be orthogonal (so I was wrong about that I think), the problem being a periodic return to a broken service proxy. when that broken proxy is the DNS end point then blank page.

anyway, still a theory. I'll post here once various tickets have been responded to.

intersting example in any case.

actually i take that back....direct telnet to rte...

$ telnet 89.207.56.140 80
Trying 89.207.56.140...
Connected to www.rte.ie.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.rte.ie

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: max-age=180
Expires: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:34:00 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Server-Name: td
Content-Type: text/html
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:31:00 GMT
X-Varnish: 1122786280
Age: 0
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache: MISS
X-Served-By: sqc.rte.ie

ie. no caching or deflating tags...looks like caching and zipping must have been proxying service, and now it occurs to me that ip address in X-Status tag must be based on my own routers eircom ip address end point (palm forhead :P )

anyway, thanks for help - i'll post here if any updates

Spear · 23-07-2013 1:40pm

You're connecting to the unblock-us proxy directly, I can't imagine Eircom are going to cache telnet traffic like that. So it seems that the unblock-us proxy is where the issue lies.

Spear · 23-07-2013 1:44pm

styo wrote: »

actually i take that back....direct telnet to rte...

Without an Accept-Encoding header, you'll get uncompressed responses by default.

Curl would allow for more flexible testing:

curl -I --compressed www.rte.ie
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: max-age=180
Expires: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:44:26 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-Server-Name: td
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 12357
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:43:38 GMT
X-Varnish: 1391385534 1391349146
Age: 132
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache: HIT
X-Served-By: sqd.rte.ie

styo · 23-07-2013 1:44pm

Spear wrote: »

You're connecting to the unblock-us proxy directly, I can't imagine Eircom are going to cache telnet traffic like that. So it seems that the unblock-us proxy is where the issue lies.

telnet pot 80 appears identical to http browser traffic (a port is a port is a port), but yes, agree, looks to be the proxy service.

unblock-us? how did you know?

I thought I was careful to avoid advertising their service?

anyway, cheers for help and apologies to brian h for what turned out to be off topic...

Spear · 23-07-2013 1:50pm

styo wrote: »

telnet pot 80 appears identical to http browser traffic (a port is a port is a port), but yes, agree, looks to be the proxy service.

unblock-us? how did you know? I thought I was careful to avoid advertising their service?

anyway, cheers for help and apologies to brian h for what turned out to be off topic...

That IP cheerfully returns who they are in the headers.

ElNino · 23-07-2013 2:47pm

I use unblock-us as well and occasionally I have to turn it off to access the RTE website or RTE Player. The reasons are covered on their support site here
http://support.unblock-us.com/customer/portal/questions/347471-rte-player

styo · 24-07-2013 8:08am

ElNino wrote: »

I use unblock-us as well and occasionally I have to turn it off to access the RTE website or RTE Player. The reasons are covered on their support site here
http://support.unblock-us.com/customer/portal/questions/347471-rte-player

Hi ElNino, that might certainly explain problems with streaming from RTE (although that isn't a problem for me), but I don't think it explains the return of blank pages for what are ordinary web pages form the main rte web site. I note also that they don't explain the problem, just say don't use the service. The round trip explanation doesn't seem plausible to me - streaming is dependent on bandwidth, not latency - and doesn't explain why rte streaming fails but bbc streaming doesn't?

I suppose one could investigate further to see exactly where their proxy servers are depliyed in each case.

I did a bit of further investigation on my problem, once unblock-us seemed to be the root cause of my problems (and not eircom as I erroneously theorised) and have sent the following to them, whcih I think explains what i'm seeing...but open to sugestions...

"so I noticed intermittent page loading problems and i think i have spotted why. This example using www.rte.ie, but should work for any site you proxy.

1. dig @8.8.8.8 www.rte.ie delivers correct ip addresses for rte.ie as one would expect from google.

2. dig @08.122.23.22 www.rte.ie produces ip addresses from a rolling (?) set of your proxy server addresses. The ip address 67.216.222.5 periodically is returned as prime ip resolution for www.rte.ie.

3. the following is the consistent, and broken response from that server,

telnet 67.216.222.5 80
Trying 67.216.222.5...
Connected to 67.216.222.5.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /news/index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.rte.ie

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:03:49 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: brain/2.0
X-Status: cached-86.46.197.126
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Connection closed by foreign host.

4. this is the response irrespective of what page or site one attempts to access. all other ip addresses from the example.com domain appear to serve content properly.

5. end result is that one has periodic page access failure that lasts so long as 67.216.222.5 is returned as ip address in DNS resolution."

Strange problem on Eircom. Web pages not loading.

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