Is the cow ill?

[Ron Lindeboom]

The traffic on the site has been fairly steady and things have been pretty robust in the overall traffic patterns, etc.

If there are issues (and it does seem that a certain cross-section of members in the UK are having issues), it *may* be (and this is only a guess) that your teleco provider in the UK may be filtering the COW as a spam site. If this is happening, it may be due to the fact that we have so many members that when we send out newsletters, so many go out that they assume we must be a spam site or something. You may wish to contact them and ask that they “white list” the Creative COW servers as we are a legitimate service provider and not a spam engine.

Please ask them to whitelist 64.71.189.226, 64.71.189.228, 64.71.189.229.

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Simon Thompson]

I’m having the same problem. In the UK using NTL. Will pass on the details you suggested and we’ll see if anyone listens! Anyone else struggling in UK on NTL or other ISPs?

[Eric Bliss]

Hello Simon.

Could you please write me with exactly what symptoms you’re encountering? We’re hearing from a number of people in the UK are having problems.

eric at creativecow.net

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

int main(void) {
printf(“Hello World!\n”);
}

[Simon Thompson]

OK Eric here goes.
When I go to the COW website the top title etc loads straight away, then nothing for up to 5 mins then the rest of the page loads. Same for individual forums, the top left green box loads straight away then 5 minutes wait till rest of page loads eventually. Phil’s advice above of disabling javascript works and site then works at normal speed minus some of the adverts. Running Safari 2.0.4 on OSX 10.4.8
Hope this info is useful.
Simon

[Antony Buonomo]

quote from SimonT
“OK Eric here goes.
When I go to the COW website the top title etc loads straight away, then nothing for up to 5 mins then the rest of the page loads. Same for individual forums, the top left green box loads straight away then 5 minutes wait till rest of page loads eventually. Phil’s advice above of disabling javascript works and site then works at normal speed minus some of the adverts. Running Safari 2.0.4 on OSX 10.4.8”

I echo all this info.

[Phil Stone]

I have found the fix – click on the Sony ad to the right of this page turn on Java script then return to the Cow – Eveything is OK now.

Good old Sony

[Antony Buonomo]

Thanks Phil, everything hunky-dory now! Weeiiirrd that an ad can do that…

[Eric Bliss]

Actually Phil, it isn’t the Sony ad.

After a great deal of headaches, the answer turned out to be that a firewall rule on one of our servers got corrupted, causing that one server to block some, but not all UK traffic. The reason it took so long to diagnose is that since people were actually able to load part of the page, and since we’d heard that turning Javascript off seemed to affect the problem, it didn’t sound like a firewall issue.

Many thanks should actually go to Mark Howard, who helped me by being my eyes and ears for what was happening on the UK side as we worked on the problem, and who allowed me to finally pin down the problem.

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

int main(void) {
printf(“Hello World!\n”);
}