Evan Kirkendall wrote on Sat, 07 June 2008 19:53 |
Try accessing the forums around 1am EST. You'll get a blank screen. It happens every night. It's my normal browsing time after gigs, and I always have to deal with it..
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OK - I myself happened to be online tonight a little after 10 pm Pacific, (1 am Eastern), and sure enough, there was the blank page. It finally came back up about 11:10 Pacific.
More info - this isn't a "page not found" error like the site is down - it's just a blank white page, and the loading status says "Done" at the bottom, even with a refresh. But here's where it gets weird. Viewing the source, instead of getting a pagefull of HTML, below is the sole HTML for the page at that time:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>
Nothing else at all. I tried this at several intervals with the same result. Now that it's back online, all the normal HTML code you'd expect to see is also back.
Something is apparently substituting the normal content with the above code during these downtimes - what the heck could be causing that, especially every night?
Edit: OK - I'm actually motivated to find out what's going on because for the last couple months I haven't been able to access any messages on another forum because they show as blank, though their main pages are OK. The blank pages there display the exact same source code - it's apparently plugged in when either code or settings are incorrect on the server. So I spent a while searching for info and came up with some links, (mostly tech forum threads), that might shed some illumination on the situation. Unfortunately, I'm not code savvy enough to get much further.
The odd thing here is that it seems to be a temporary disruption at this forum, while at the other site it's constant, but dynamic, because many other users can see them fine. And yes, I've tried it on numerous different computers, (like 30), so I know it's not just an individual browser issue, rather, something in the code that interacts differently depending on the client {settings} it sees. And while many of the docs refer to IIS, it appears it may involve php and sql here.
Links:
http://forums.iis.net/p/1146080/1855373.aspx#1855373 http://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2006/05/08/HOWTO-Us eful-ASP-page-to-return-configurable-HTTP-Status-codes.aspx
https://forums.iis.net/p/1148194/1864452.aspx#1864452 http://forums.iis.net/t/1093499.aspx?PageIndex=1 http://forums.iis.net/t/1146911.aspx?PageIndex=1http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/328498'Hope this helps...
John