There’s a post on Hacker News today pointing to a few open source javascript libraries that Google is hosting on their content distribution network. ScriptSrc.net has a great UI that gives you an easy way to link to the libs from your web pages. Developers and companies can link to these scripts from their own websites and gain the following benefits:

Your visitor may have already cached the script on another website so your page will load faster
The script is hosted …

Read on »

It’s now exactly a week since I blogged about my SSL issues over our network. To summarize, when fetching documents on the web via HTTPS from my servers, the connection would just hang halfway through until it timed out. I had confirmed that it wasn’t the infamous PMTU ICMP issue that is common if you’re fetching documents via HTTPS from a misconfigured web server. It was being caused by inbound HTTPS data packets getting dropped and when the retransmit would …

Read on »

I’ve spent the last 5 days agonizing over a very hard problem on my network. Using curl, LWP::UserAgent, openssl, wget or any other SSL client, I’d see connections either timeout or hang halfway through the transfer. Everything else works fine including secure protocols like SSH and TLS. In fact inbound SSL connections work great too. It’s just when I connect to an external SSL host that it hiccups.
If you remember your OSI model, SSL is well above layer 3 (IP …

Read on »