PlanetCatfish.com

does this ring a bell?

Host Not Configured to Serve Web Traffic

You've requested a page on a website (http://www.planetcatfish.com) that is on the CloudFlare network. Unfortunately, the host web server does not appear to be configured to accept web traffic or serve web traffic. If you are the owner of this website, you should login to CloudFlare and change the DNS records for to resolve to a server configured to serve web traffic.

If you continue to experience this error, you may contact support. Please reference the following information in your message:

Timestamp: Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:58:24 -0700

Your IP address: 84.83.116.96

Requested URL: http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/index.php

Error reference number: 1004

Server ID: FL_20F3

Process ID: PID_1333871904.946-32-1749272973

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko/20120325 Firefox/11.0.1 PaleMoon/11.0.1

I just ran into it.


weirdness ensued

Yes, it's legit. Since yesterday, we've been using cloudflare to improve the response times and security of the site. However, the suggested cause of the error (incorrectly configured nameservers) is not the case. I think it may be a temporary thing as the internet gets used to Planet being served up via a reverse proxy.

I appreciate that's all technobabble, but it's a tough one to explain beyond "I changed stuff yesterday and it'll take a while to settle down".

Jools

technobabble is OK
;)

it's just that I'd rather "cry wolf" over something that's harmless than say nothing when I saw something odd and 5 minutes later PC goes into full Crash & Burn mode
;)

sidguppy wrote:it's just that I'd rather "cry wolf" over something that's harmless than say nothing when I saw something odd and 5 minutes later PC goes into full Crash & Burn mode
;)

Absolutely right! Reporting things that aren't "as they should" is fine - even if me and/or Jools know about it, we'd rather have a report of it - the worst thing is when you that something has been broken for 6 months and then when it gets reported, 5 other people say "I've seen that too, but thought you knew it was broken".

--
Mats

Going to keep this here for a week so that anyone else can report the same issue.

Jools

For those with a technical interest, cloudflare allows helper apps to run in the cloud to do tuning, security, analytics and other helpful tasks. The main one we are using is scrapeshield.

Jools

Interesting service, but how does cloudflare actually make any money from it?

Mike_Noren wrote:Interesting service, but how does cloudflare actually make any money from it?

They charge for it.

Jools

Jools wrote:They charge for it.

$20/mo & website isn't money, and most non-commercial sites will probably use the free version. I've a hard time seeing how this could be profitable for them.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, it seems like an interesting service, I just feel I must be missing something.

Host Not Configured to Serve Web Traffic
You've requested a page on a website (www.planetcatfish.com) that is on the CloudFlare network. Unfortunately, the host web server does not appear to be configured to accept web traffic or serve web traffic. If you are the owner of this website, you should login to CloudFlare and change the DNS records for to resolve to a server configured to serve web traffic.

If you continue to experience this error, you may contact support. Please reference the following information in your message:

Timestamp: Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:10:23 -0700

Your IP address: 204.9.10.72

Requested URL: www.planetcatfish.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=35818

Error reference number: 1004

Server ID: FL_14F10

Process ID: PID_1333908623.907-1-72090153

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/534.55.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.5 Safari/534.55.3

same thing happened to me! how strange

I am having this same problem.
This error warning has popped up when attempting to edit a post, refresh the site and open it up in the first place.
It is not consistent but it is locking up my Firefox browser and I have the latest and fully patched version.
It is interfering even as I try to post this.

Just saw this.....

thats exactly what I saw

apart from a few numbers that have changed
;)

OK, looking into it to see if this is really a transitional issue or if there is something incorrect.

Jools

It's not the simplest way to enter a site, but if you retry a couple of times things work.

It's made it down here now, but 1 refresh and it's back on line.
Seems a tad slow, but it could be re-caching stuff or whatever.

Jools wrote:
"I changed stuff yesterday and it'll take a while to settle down".

Jools

Awesome. I might have to use that one at work

I also tried some image work and am hoping things just need to catch up with what I did. Things are confused...captions with wrong images and things like that in the image updates.

Birger

Birger wrote:I also tried some image work and am hoping things just need to catch up with what I did. Things are confused...captions with wrong images and things like that in the image updates.

It seems that you fixed it?

Anyway, I've heard back from the web hosting company (dreamhost) and they're still looking into it although I am not amazingly confident the answer will be anything more definitive than what I've said above.

Jools

definitely not fixed

this cloadflare is blocking PC, I think

I could not get on the site by going the normal URL (www.planetcatfish.com)
nor by using the forum URL

I used google, typed a catfish species and took the long walk-around via the catelog

once I got a catelog page up (in this case Hyalobagrus flavus), I could go through to the forum....

but i had to use google first to get anywhere near PC, cause cloudfail was actively nerfing my attempts to do it the regular way.

Yesterday, I had an error message from Cloudflare that the site was unavailable. This went on for quite some time. I'm not sure what the actual cause was, but I suspect CloudFlare was "wrong", as there were quite a few new posts on the forum once I finally got in. Seems like it perhaps takes some time to load up the local cache, and in the meantime, the site is unavailable.

--
Mats

Just had this error on work laptop - screen shot function not working but just hitting refresh solved it.

sidguppy wrote:definitely not fixed

this cloadflare is blocking PC, I think

Hi Alex,

I didn't say the issue with CloudFlare was fixed - you may wish to re-read the posts above. CloudFlare isn't blocking Planet, it's the availability of Planet to CloudFlare that is the issue (and which is being looking into). I note however considerably improved response times for non-US visitors with the exception of Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands for some reason I cannot explain. Funny thing is it's now working fine for me (has been for at least 24 hours) and it's darn fast.

I will keep working with dreamhost on it as, at least for now, the potential still well outweighs some transition pain. Will back it out if we can't get resolution of the issues in a reasonable timeframe.

Cheers,

Jools

Yes, I noticed the ping-time to PC from home was in the below 50 ms range [1], rather than the 200ms range that I got before. And pages seem to load quite quickly here at work (can't ping from here, as the Firewall blocks pings!).

[1] Just logged into my linuxbox at home, and it gave me an average of 13.9ms per ping turnaround. Compared to 175ms for the www.dreamhost.com. So viewing pages that have the same content every time should be a lot faster. Pages that change will not be quite as fast, but should still be better (because a lot of the page-content is still the same)...

--
Mats

It seems that you fixed it?

No, I think it (whatever it is) just needed some time to catch up and finish the changes.

Birger

I received this warning during 6 or 7 hours:

Website Offline, No Cached Version Available

The website you are trying to access is currently offline. The most likely causes are the server is down for maintenance, there may be a network problem, or the site may be experiencing excessive load.

The site uses CloudFlare in order to help keep it online when the server is down by serving cached copies of pages where they are available. Unfortunately, a cached copy of the page you requested is not available, but you may be able to reach other cached pages on the site.

If you continue to receive this error after you believe the site is back online, you can retry a live version of the site.

Hi Jools,

There may be an issue with I.P. addresses for the first log in as I am using it on ScotCat and that bug appeared at first but seems to have settled down now. It is certainly quicker than a speeding bullet

Thanks Allan, well done for beating us to adoption of it!

Jools

Jools wrote:Thanks Allan, well done for beating us to adoption of it!

Jools

You are very welcome

FWIW I've never had an error, I'm in Sweden. Is there a geographic pattern to who gets errors? Could be that one of CloudFlare's gateways is misconfigured.

I think what happens is that the DNS (Domain Name Server) configuration gets spread around the world. When the new setting comes online, it goes to Cloudflare server rather than the original PC server - and I think that's when problem occur - it may be simply that the new configuration isn't quite the same everywhere, so the Cloudflare server can't find the PC servers elsewhere. I can tell that my machine is accessing the Cloudflare rather than the server in California just by the time it takes to get there.

Of course, this is pure speculation.

Is anyone actually seeing problems now?

--
Mats