How my blog went on strike, or the curious case of the Seznam help desk

My children, Růženooooooo…
At last! For a while it looked as though the post from
April 14, 2005, would be the last for some time. Unfortunately, I lost the ability to publish new posts. Publishing posts to Dagblog is handled by
the service
Blogger, which uploads the HTML files it generates over FTP to
Sweb. Sweb is a service run by the Seznam portal, which matters for what happened next.

Until April 20, and yes, I know the date exactly, I was a fairly happy Sweb user.
I was even happy enough to swallow the fact that they started charging me for FTP access.
It was a bargain price, but they charged me all the same. Now and then

Filemon

would tell me,

Dagi, your blog is crawling. Do something about it.
I found that odd,
because it seemed fine to me and no one but

Fil

had reported it.

The real apocalypse came on April 20, when Blogger refused to publish my new post,

Mental Hygiene with Ant
. I didn't give it much priority.
Lately publication sometimes hadn't worked on the first try and I put that
down to Blogger. After spending a day trying to publish the new post and getting
Blogger's

001 Broken pipe
message, I started looking for the cause.

The first thing I stumbled on moved the investigation a long way forward. Dagblog
uses a search service called
Atomz, which is
set to index the site's contents once a week. Fortunately, it provides
a log of the last indexing run.

04/20 13:31:40 ERROR: HTTP timeout error encountered while reading http://www.sweb.cz/robots.txt.

4: 04/20 13:32:55 ERROR: Unable to connect to host ‘www.sweb.cz', 212.80.76.12: timed out without establishing a connection.

At that point I began to suspect a problem with Sweb itself. As a
conscientious user, I decided to contact the Sweb help desk (helpdesk at seznam dot cz). What else was I supposed to do?

21.04.2005 8:15

Hello,

I've been seeing problems connecting to sweb.cz for some time. The publishing tool I use (blogger.com) tries to upload the generated HTML pages over FTP to my account (ftp.sweb.cz). Lately, unfortunately, it ends in a timeout. If it happened only when publishing, I'd look for the cause in the publishing tool. Unfortunately the service that indexes the contents of sweb.cz/pichlik (atomz.com) also times out. Could you tell me what's going on?

A reply arrived quickly, the first and last…

21.04.2005 10:40

Hello,

Please check whether passive mode is enabled in your FTP client.

Alternatively, please send us a log of your communication with ftp.sweb.cz.

When replying, please leave the full text of the previous
correspondence in your message.

Have a nice day,

Michal Bittner

Helpdesk

I'll let the reader judge how relevant the reply was. Naturally, I wrote back right away.

Hello,

Thanks for your reply. My problem isn't that FTP doesn't work. I have a problem connecting to sweb.cz! I see connectivity problems with both FTP and HTTP. I've tested FTP with the publishing tool that sends data over FTP. I've confirmed the same for HTTP with the content indexing service.

A typical example from the search service's log:

04/20 13:31:40 ERROR: HTTP timeout error encountered while reading http://www.sweb.cz/robots.txt.

4: 04/20 13:32:55 ERROR: Unable to connect to host ‘www.sweb.cz', 212.80.76.12: timed out without establishing a connection.

This morning someone I know in the US also told me my site had been down for three days. Both services run overseas too. Could you have a problem with the DNS record?

That email went unanswered. To satisfy myself, I took a few more steps
to make sure the problem was with Sweb. It wasn't very hard. First I tried
the W3C validator, which failed with this error

500 Server closed connection without sending any data back
.
More evidence came from Google, where Dagblog had dropped out of the index. To be absolutely sure, I asked

ienik
if he could try accessing Dagblog from abroad. We managed to test it from neighboring Slovakia,
and
ienik

suggested Sweb might have a peering problem.

I put everything I'd found into a new email and sent it to the help desk on April 25.

Hello,

Since you didn't respond to my April 21 email, I'm trying again. It looks as though sweb.cz has a peering problem between the Czech Republic and other countries.

1.) None of my visitors abroad (USA, Slovakia, Switzerland) can access my site, sweb.cz/pichlik.

2. Try validating the HTML using this URL

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsweb.cz%2Fpichlik

and you will get this response

I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve
 http://sweb.cz/pichlik:

500 Server closed connection without sending any data back

Please make sure you have entered the URL correctly.

3.) Atomz indexing service

04/20 13:31:40 ERROR: HTTP timeout error encountered while reading http://www.sweb.cz/robots.txt.
 4: 04/20 13:32:55 ERROR: Unable to connect to host ‘www.sweb.cz', 212.80.76.12: timed out without establishing a connection.

4.) Publishing through Blogger

001 Broken pipe (probably a timeout)

Could you tell me what's going on?

Again, no answer from the help desk! I sent the same email to the
help desk again on April 29. The odds of anyone answering were about the same as Homer
Simpson turning down a doughnut. And surprise, nobody answered again! It really got to me, and
I didn't know what to do next. On Monday I talked about it with

Filemon

and his
first piece of advice was,

Take it directly to Ivo Lukačovič. Write him an email and open
with the words

You have a nice blog. I used to have one like it…

A drowning man clutches at straws, so on Tuesday I wrote to

IL himself
.

Hi,

You've got a really interesting blog. I used to have one like it. Imagine that, it ran on Seznam's sweb.cz service and got over two hundred unique visitors a day. My blog at sweb.cz/pichlik has been inaccessible for a while. You may wonder why I'm bothering you with this. Well, I'm bothering you so you can see how the Seznam help desk works.

The problem with the sweb.cz service as a whole is that it can't be reached from abroad. My blog makes this easy to check. Google stopped indexing it, the W3C validator can't validate its pages, and Blogger can't publish new posts… All those problems have one thing in common. The connection to IP address 212.80.76.12 (sweb.cz) from abroad is unavailable or times out. I could give you more evidence that sweb.cz simply can't be reached from abroad.

I reported everything I'm telling you to the help desk four times (twice on April 21, then April 25 and 29). Unfortunately I got no answer. I even tried to track down the cause. In my humble opinion, Sweb.cz has a peering problem, or its DNS entry points to some antiquated clunker.

I would have thought giving some kind of answer was a basic duty of any help desk. It would have been enough for someone to say, “We know about the problem and we're working on it,” or “Sir, you're completely off the mark. No such problem exists.” It's quite frustrating to know the probable cause, report it and get no feedback.

Surprise, no reply again. To hell with it, though. Publishing works again, and this post proves it. All the same,
the way the Seznam portal's help desk works has left a bitter taste. I probably won't ever know whether the mighty

Ivo Lukačovič

pulled a lever or the folks at Sweb came to their senses…