In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
on Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 08:07:00AM +0800, Richard Kay wrote:
> Time to hose the drive and reinstall Tiger.
I don't think it would be reasonable to jump to that conclusion. Different
subscriber networks can route their traffic differently, and servers can choose
to differentiate their traffic based on criteria such as client IP blocks.
E.g., if Bigpond allocates you with an IP addresses that Apple services via a
pool that is under unexpectedly high load, you may experience trouble that
others don't. Likewise, Akamai might just be screwing with your head as usual
(i.e., DNS problem). Remember how inconsistent and frustrating the traffic
management of Software Update is? I wouldn't be surprised if it were currently
the same story with the main website. Lacking any network diagnostics to prove
otherwise (don't forget: web browsers are incredibly poor performers as
diagnostic tools), the last thing I'd suspect is my own computer.
If you are still having the problem, I predict it'd be easy to demonstrate it
is an Akamai-related issue. In the Terminal, type this on a line:
curl --proxy '' --dump-header - --output /dev/null http://www.apple.com/au/
and then press Return. You might expect to see something like the excerpt at
the end of this e-mail. Alternatively, you might try
telnet www.apple.com 80
in which case you might see something like this:
Trying 17.112.152.32...
Connected to www.apple.com.akadns.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
(which will time out after a few seconds unless you know how to form an HTTP
header). The three outcomes from the telnet attempt are that (a) www.apple.com
has been converted to an IP address successfully (17.112.152.32 -- it may
differ for you due to the way the system works, or if Bigpond has not yet
received/propagated new AkaDNS information), and (b) that it corresponds to an
Apple-sponsored server (www.apple.com.akadns.net.), and (c) that a connection
has been made successfully ("connected"). Your web browser doesn't give you
this level of detail.
Here is the aforementioned output from curl:
_______________________________
% curl --proxy '' --dump-header - --output /dev/null http://www.apple.com/au/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Age: 171
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 01:26:20 GMT
Content-Length: 11651
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 01:36:20 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=600
Connection: close
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Darwin) PHP/4.3.1 mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.7b
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Curr.
Dload Upload Total Current Left Speed
100 11651 100 11651 0 0 5675 0 0:00:02 0:00:02 0:00:00 23990
_______________________________
This shows success. Failure would be different in some way.
