624924 - Don't redirect to status.mozilla.org during outages

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations: Projects, task)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

While Bugzilla was down today, every page redirected to http://status.mozilla.com/en-US/outages.html. This is bad because:

* I can lose track of what pages I had open, especially if I use session restore.

* Even if I don't lose data immediately, I have to take extra steps to not lose it, rather than leaving the tab open and reloading later.

* As a redirect from https to http, it can cause browser dialogs to appear, especially after POST.

I'd prefer an ugly page with no URL change over a pretty page with a redirect.

Comment 1

[Corey Shields [:cshields]]

I understand how much it sucks, I had to hit the back button on a few reload tabs myself to get my state back (and we've had one other complaint that a session restore during the outage caused this same problem).  I guess my question is what are the chances of this being a problem for you every time we have had an outage?  How often has this happened for you?  Was yesterday the first time?

As inconvenient as this is, I believe it may just have to be accepted as collateral damage.  A majority of our end users are best served with a human readable error page (and one that is seen to the browser as a 200 rather than a timeout).  I understand that bugzilla's users are a different breed and may not need such a page.  But, not doing this on one site and keeping it for the rest breaks consistency.

Let me see if our load balancers can return that page without redirecting the URL itself.

Comment 2

[Corey Shields [:cshields]]

We might be able to do this with trafficscripts instead of redirects, per:

http://knowledgehub.zeus.com/articles/2005/11/11/embedding_images_in_error_pages

(justdave has some knowledge here)

Need to test and decide if this is what we want to do, but this will be prioritized after Firefox 4.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

> I guess my question is what are the chances of this being a problem for you 
> every time we have had an outage?  How often has this happened for you?  Was 
> yesterday the first time?

I live in Bugzilla, so I've hit problems like this (to some degree) every time I noticed Bugzilla redirecting to outages.html.

Comment 4

[Corey Shields [:cshields]]

Given that the last couple of outages have been survived by rolling bugs over to the backup data center, I am closing this out.

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

All hg.mozilla.org URLs are redirecting to http://hardhat.mozilla.net/en-US/outages.html today. Why does that domain even exist?

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

Re comment 1, it would be less damaging if the hardhat URL included the original URL, so I could get back there.  But really, that's what HTTP 500 error pages are for.