Page not found issue

[Bruce Cornett]

am having an issue with "pages not found" from various client machines. The 
symptoms seem to vary a bit, but in general it seems that the user cannot 
see a story - and in at least one case cannot see the sign up pages, etc.

A very curious thing is that the URLs listed seem to vary a bit - I see 
http://www.manywaystopeace.org/stories/storyReader$71 and he sees 
http://www.manywaystopeace.org/stories/storyReader$86 or some such in the 
mouse over - and then he doesn't find the page.

Is he making this up?

At first I thought it was a mac thing. But he gets the same behavior via 
IE/Netscape PC or Mac (and his mac Netscape 4.7 gives him fits - apparently 
a lot of mac folks still use this). Then I thought it was a proxy/firewall 
issue, but he gets the same behavior on the machine with the direct 
connection to the net - no proxy/firewall. (The connection there is 
roadrunner - perhaps it is a roadrunner caching issue - though I didn't 
think they cached their connections.)

Another client can see the site with little problems from his home office - 
but from the macs at the university, same behavior as the first - page not 
found. And sometimes he gets page not found from his machine (using a 
Netscape dialup).

We are not showing any routing errors into here - at least none that we 
know about. Folks tend to let us know pretty quickly if there is any sort 
of difficulty routing in. This particular server is not dual-homed, but it 
again there has been no issue on that circuit.

Perhaps these are fixed in the current .root - which I assume I'll be able 
to fetch as soon as the Frontier folks cash my check.

I have searched the discussion groups to the extent possible - (which 
produce somewhat lame results - I just don't think I care much about 
postings two years old that seem to relate to older versions and therefore 
are not applicable. And why are we using google for search - what does that 
say about me using the Frontier search product?)

I restarted Frontier - I seemed to recall a brief mention that this was a 
good idea to restart daily - is that right? I had disabled the messenger 
service on the server to block those most recent windows messenger spams. I 
thought there might be a connection, so I restarted it. No change.

Oh and I just received a mail from another client - using macs - going 
direct over roadrunner - no proxy or firewall (contrary to my 
recommendation) and he writes:

 >I tried out the page you said had Mac problems, and I could not
 >get it. I could get the main index page, but couldn't get
 >the /stories page. This was on Mac Internet Explorer 5.0. Let me
 >know if you want me to try something else.

I just left the office and tried to access the site from a client's and the 
pages that linked down to stories, etc. failed.  This was via a SOCKS proxy.

Does anyone have any ideas? I am at a loss.

This has been cross-posted to the Frontier discussion list and this mailing 
list.  To new to figure out where folks are and how we get questions 
answered.  Is this the only support option?

Bruce C