Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Trying to read my feeds I get some nice 500 errors from Bloglines:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@bloglines.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.5-dev (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.5-dev OpenSSL/0.9.7a Server at www.bloglines.com Port 80

This kind of error is interesting because while Bloglines’ home page is up and working, their service is not, and that’s something very hard for monitoring tools like Pingdom to monitor without the cooperation of the web service. If there’s ever a standard created for an open web 2.0 service, an interface by which one can query which parts of it are up and down should factor in. It could be as simple as a ping, or as complex as a list of components and statuses. Just fire off a request to api.example.com/ping and get back “up” or “down.” You could use api.example.com/uptime for information about uptime and api.example.com/status for more detailed information.

Of the last 40 updates I’ve made to my Facebook Application for showing Stock Quotes, 6 have failed with a “Unknown data store API error.” While I have no idea what the error means, it seems to indicate that Facebook couldn’t save the data I sent it at a 15% rate for that period of 10 hours.

Other Facebook Platform issues include restricted growth, bugs in the developer application, downtime, and poor performance. Obviously, F8 will go through some growing pains before it fully matures.

If you want to monitoring the bandwidth in/out of your linux server, a tool like bmon is essential. Use the fedora core RPMs from dries rather than compiling from source, it’s a lot easier. For some reason it refused to link to my ncurses, but once I installed the binary I got this beautiful graph:

You can run it with bmon -r .1 -R 30 to get a 30 second average, or with -o ascii to get terminal “plain” output for use with the standard linux pipes, cuts and other tools.