Trying To Signup

[Gokussj5okazu]

Hello! New guy here, been trying to sign up since Monday with no luck. The past three nights, I've stayed up past 2AM my time (12AM PST), in an attempt to signup on Stevie. However, despite both

 

http://byrondallas.heliohost.org/helio/sign-up.php

 

and

 

http://heliohost.grd.net.pl/monitor/

 

showing that Stevie is, indeed, open to registrations, I can't seem to do it. It keeps telling me that the daily limit is exceeded, even after exactly 12AM PST. Any wise words, anyone? Thanks!

[Krydos]

Congratulations! Your account has been added to the creation queue. You should be able to login at test.heliohost.org/cpanel within 24 hours. Please note, however, that because account creation is daemonized it may take up to 48 hours before your site is up on the web.

Since I've seen several reports of people having trouble creating accounts lately I did some checking. Both the monitor and byrons script says that signups are available on both servers. There are 10 queued accounts (accounts that have been recently been created and are waiting in line to have disk space allocated etc) and hundreds of accounts are created each day on both servers for the past several weeks. Finding no problems with any of that I actually signed up for a new account myself and sure enough it worked. Sorry for wasting one of the signup slots for today on an account that I'm just going to delete anyways, but I have no idea why people keep having problems signing up at this point.

[Piotr GRD]

...but I have no idea why people keep having problems signing up at this point.

 

 

I have an idea. Cache. Check the HTTP headers.

 

www.heliohost.org/scripts/signup.php?plan=1

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:37:41 GMT
...
Expires: Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:37:41 GMT
...

 

www.heliohost.org/scripts/signup.php?plan=9

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:38:29 GMT
...
Expires: Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:38:29 GMT
...

 

 

 

To (future) users: clear your browser cache.

To HelioHost admins: change HTTP headers so these pages won't be cached by browsers.

[Gokussj5okazu]

Hm, thanks for looking into it. As of now, I still can't signup, even after clearing my cache completely, and a restart just to make sure my browser was empty. No dice. :/

[Piotr GRD]

Because at the moment sign ups are actually closed (for ~2 hours for Stevie and ~1.5 hour for Johnny).

It was already closed at the time of my previous post.

 

[Gokussj5okazu]

Ok thanks. It seems a full cache also affects the script and the monitor, as they're both reporting it closed now as well when they didn't before. Thanks again! I'll try again in a little while.

[Krydos]

Regardless of whether the reporting and monitoring tools work or don't work doesn't change the fact that I successfully created an account less than an hour after someone claimed they couldn't create an account. I didn't use any admin override or anything like that; I just used the same system that everyone else would have.

[Piotr GRD]

Main point is - in my opinion:

 

"Expire" header says it can be cached for one month and various browsers may or may not cache it. My browser "decide" to not cache it - most likely because this is a "*.php?..." kind of URL which usually is source of dynamic content. But some browsers may cache it, especially if there is additionally "Cache-Control: public" header.

 

Some people may figure it out, some people may not.

To these people that will read this topic we may say: "try to clear the cache".

For these people that won't realize possibility of pages being cached and won't read about it anywhere admins may try to change the HTTP headers sent by the "signup.php" script. (ie. this IPB forum is sending "Expire" header with the time in the past, but imagine that it doesn't - some people may not spot new topics created right away but much later).

 

Sometimes we may also have some proxies between server and visitor (ie. when using computer in university or in some company network instead of learning/working hard ; ) ) and in such case proper cache dispositions in HTTP headers may be the only way for being sure that the current content of the page will be displayed and not the expired one.

 

 

 

As for my monitor - my monitor while accessing registration pages do not use any cache and always tries to get the response directly from server. But with pages that display my results I don't send any cache dispositions, so it's fully up to browsers/proxies/whatever if content of my pages is cached or not and for how long. Check if the time diplayed on the right of the graph is not older than 2 minutes for being sure.

 

[Gokussj5okazu]

Just thought I'd chime in again real quick, Stevie has been down for 8 hours now, not ~2. Either way, I'm going to wait until midnight again and try once more. Thanks.