500 Server Error for no apparent reason

Under Subject: Add Subject Here
Howard.Deehan@chi.frb.org wrote:

> We have been using the link checker application for the last couple of
> year with no problems.  But  in the last two weeks we have been
> getting
> the following error:
>
> 500 21 This is a server side problem. Check the URI.
>
> We enter the following information on the main page
>
> http://www.FRBDiscountWindow.org
>
> X       Summary only
>        Hide redirects: all for directories only
> X       Don't send the Accept-Language header
> X       Don't send the Referer header
> X       Check linked documents recursively, recursion depth:
>        Save options in a cookie

This looks odd indeed. When using the link checker on the URL mentioned 
above, with settings as above, one gets, among other things, 7 errors with 
code 500 under the heading
"Processing 
http://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/frbdw_sitemap.cfm?genid=26&desc=Site%20Map&url=frbdw_sitemap.cfm"

Using the link checker on that URL, I get 24 errors with code 500!

Picking up the first URL reported to have that problem, namely
http://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/faqs.cfm?genid=28&desc=Frequently%20Asked%20Questions&url=faqs.cfm
and running the link checker on it gives a clean report - when "Check linked 
recursively" is _not_ checked. When it is checked, I get 21 errors (500).

So it seems that the "recursive" (actually, it's iteration, not recursion, 
if you ask me) checking leads to _some_ unspecified URLs that cause 
failures. I'm not sure how one could proceed, since the link checker does 
not seem to report the URLs that actually fail, just URLs that contain links 
to pages that contain links to pages that ... that contain links that fail

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 10 September 2009 16:44:17 UTC