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Apple Developer Center still down

marco.org

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Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#3

Post by nwh »

My money is personally on massive, unrecoverable data loss.

If you've ever poked around with the way that Apple's website works, you can see that the entire place is a huge mess. There's old servers running ancient (pre-2004) perl scripts alongside the brand new iCloud gear. I can't imagine how the authentication for AppleID is working as login details still work on the ancient pages (think pinstripes and glassy buttons). Depending what URL you hit, the webserver is using php3, php4, perl, python or maybe WebObjects (java).

At one point I wrote a scraper that was targeting one of their product pages, and kept getting random, unexplainable results. It turned out that one of their product areas was behind a round-robin load balancer, with three completely different apache versions on each server. The page was dying on one but not the other two. In the end I just had to repetitively scrape until I hit a good response.

Even the domain for the "maintenance" page for the developer section is telling. It's just a broken template system regurgitating a bit of the homepage.

http://devimages.apple.com/maintenance/

http://devimages.apple.com/

Truly a hacked together system. Some engineers at Apple must be having a truly awful weekend, no matter the cause and solution.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#5

Post by nicholassmith »

nwh wrote: post #3

My money is personally on massive, unrecoverable data loss. If you've ever poked around with the way that Apple's website works, you can see that the entire place is a huge mess. There's old servers running ancient (pre-2004) perl scripts alongside the brand new iCloud gear. I can't imagine how the authentication for AppleID is working as login details still work on the ancient pages (think pinstripes and glassy butt…

I've spent more time using the developer resources recently, and I completely agree. Clicking one link will take you an entirely different feeling architecture, like parts have been built on top without thinking about what the impacts could be. It's probably been a house of cards for a long and it's now fallen down.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#6

Post by saurik »

nwh wrote: post #3

My money is personally on massive, unrecoverable data loss. If you've ever poked around with the way that Apple's website works, you can see that the entire place is a huge mess. There's old servers running ancient (pre-2004) perl scripts alongside the brand new iCloud gear. I can't imagine how the authentication for AppleID is working as login details still work on the ancient pages (think pinstripes and glassy butt…

Interesting; the http://devimages.apple.com/ URL seems to return the underlying contents of the file, bypassing the SSI (I'm so happy they use SSI... seriously: I love SSI ;P). You can then see the raw directives, and pull the individual parts. (It isn't quite then fair to say that it is a "broken bit of their template system"; it is more that it is a poor way to setup a static large-file caching endpoint, and may itself lead to a security vulnerability. To be clear: that's probably worse ;P.)

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#8

Post by coldtea »

nicholassmith wrote: post #4
coldtea wrote: post #2

Gee, thanks Marco, we would have never known ourselves...

That sounds like "I just read the title so I could post a snarky remark". He does put some suggestions forward of what he thinks could be the root cause.

I read the whole article. The suggestions cover all the cases one would that thought himself.

He is being Captain Obvious.

Including the gem to "set some time aside" as developers, because we might have some work to do after the site comes back up.

Everything in the comment is what men wiser than us called "idle speculation".

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#9

Post by saurik »

coldtea wrote: post #2

Gee, thanks Marco, we would have never known ourselves...

Marco's audience includes a bunch of people who wouldn't have known this, or might have assumed it's back up: this draws attention back to it for people who like discussing this sort of thing (although, past that point, I largely agree with you, as I'm not certain what really there is to discuss).

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#10

Post by coldtea »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #7

Could you imagine if the Linux Developer Center went down? It'd be nearly impossible to write Linux software, or download Linux development tools, or generate a Linux binary that a device was allowed to run. It'd be awful.

Nice attempt at snark, but something being fault-proof in this regard doesn't magically make it worthy in others.

Like desktop use, for one. People will not adopt Linux for their desktop/laptop even when offered for free. Where by people I mean more than 1% of them.

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