Re: Hotmail access problem

>> Hi all
>> Hotmail.com is not accessing through squid what could be the problem
>
>They made some changes a few days ago.
>
>I had to manually telnet to a number of our cache peers and do a get with
>Pragma: no-cache to fix it. For some reason the peers still had the old
>home page (which was a redirect done in HTML) cached after it was changed
>to a Location: header type redirect. The hostname in the old redirect points
>to a machine which continually times out.

I was having the same problem last week. A bad version of the hotmail
homepage which said
        "Hotmail redirect in progress. Please wait..."
(but which didn't actually do the redirect) kept popping up. I went so
far as to issue a purge for http://www.hotmail.com/ and
http://hotmail.com/ on every squid cache we peer with, but it kept
coming back and propagating between caches.

This lead me to suspect that Hotmail was using some sort of reverse
proxy or redirector and that they have a rogue backend web server that
is still serving the old version. I tried complaining to Hotmail and
after several canned responses, I got (on Thursday, July 8):

 This e-mail is to let you know that the problem you've described=
 to the Technical Support Staff has been confirmed and is=
 currently under evaluation. We understand the importance of=
 this issue and are doing everything within our means to correct=
 the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have=
 caused you, and we thank for your continued patience.

(Just another canned response?)

My workaround was to prevent the offending pages from being cached:

acl LOSERS url_regex ^http://www\.hotmail\.com/$ ^http://hotmail\.com/$
no_cache deny LOSERS

--
Chris Teakle
Network Development, ITS
The University of Qld