debugging LJ (sent from primary email account)

[cellio]

[Sorry for any duplication. Will delete if this makes it through.]

Ok, this is interesting. I can't truly complete the experiment until I get home, but in pursuit of more data...

This is actually the second recent posting outage for some LJ users; there was one a week earlier, which I discovered when I came back from Shavu'ot and tried to post. The web interface seemed to be broken so I tried posting by email (from my shell account, which is not hosted in my home); the email bounced. I'm pretty sure I filed a support request; if I did, it went unanswered.

When the current problem started last Thursday, I again tried posting by email and it again failed. Then I saw advice from LJ support saying to post by email, so I tried again, it bounced again, and I filed the first of what would eventually be three related bug reports. The first two went unanswered; the third one generated a request for more information. (Progress!) Also yesterday, I learned by exploring the support queue (where you get better information than the status page if you don't mind some digging) that the problem might be related to IP address. I can't access the web site from work (my only network presence other than home), but I can send email.

My short email post from work got through; so did one from an email mirror site that's served by the same ISP as my home. (Different IP address, obviously, but same region of the topography as my hindered home address.) It might be that all short email gets through just like short posts via the web interface do, so now it's time to try a longer email post. If this were sent from my shell account it would presumably bounce (based on past behavior); I wonder what will happen if I send it from my email mirror and from work.

Comments

[matsujo9.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you have status friended, but they've been posting variations on this message today:

Posted by: A LiveJournal Admin

We've been dealing with an increased amount of malicious traffic recently. In order to ensure LiveJournal's overall availability, we've take a couple of measures to minimize the impact of this traffic. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of preventing some users from posting long entries or comments. We're working on resolving this problem as soon as we can, and we apologize for the frustration it's causing.

[geekosaur]

Yeh.

For what it's worth, I suspect this means "very short timeouts" for at least some address blocks, so either a faster network path or a server not in one of the limited netblocks would help.

[cellio]

Wow -- it did show up, unlike prior posts mailed from that address. It took about an hour and a half to appear; the ones from other addresses took less than a minute.

Curiouser and curiouser.

[jducoeur]

Yeah -- my longer email posts yesterday took at least three hours to show up...

[cellio]

What was odd was that most of my email posts appeared within seconds (no more than a minute). The one that took a while was from the same IP address that had previously generated bounces.