Re: [Lynx-dev] Why Do I Receive a Gateway Timeout on www.crisisgroup.org

[David Niklas]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 06:39:38 -0400 (EDT)
address@hidden wrote:
> > Normally 504 gateway errors have nothing to do with your personal
> > setup.  Instead they reflect a communications error between the
> > site's own servers, timing out communications wise.  
> 
> With lynx, I see an immediate (on human timescales) HTTP/1.1 504
> GATEWAY_TIMEOUT response.  With my own manual fetcher script, I see a
> redirect to HTTPS.  I infer they are playing silly User-Agent: games.
> Maybe telling lynx to lie in its User-Agent: header would work around
> whatever is broken?
> 
> Gateway Timeout _is_ the standard meaning of 504: "The 504 (Gateway
> Timeout) status code indicates that the server, while acting as a
> gateway or proxy, did not receive a timely response from an upstream
> server it needed to access in order to complete the request.".  I
> suppose it's possible that lynx requests get redirected to a backend
> that's timing out.  But the short time before I get the 504 argues
> against that.  Without transparency into the server setup behind it,
> it's difficult to say more.
<snip>

My lynx:

Lynx Version 2.8.9dev.11 (15 Nov 2016)
libwww-FM 2.14, SSL-MM 1.4.1, GNUTLS 3.5.6, ncurses 6.0.20161126(wide)

On:

Linux Phenom-II-x6 4.17.8dav1 #5 SMP PREEMPT Thu Aug 9 03:50:23 UTC 2018
x86_64 GNU/Linux

has the same problem. Using curl or changing the user agent header fixes
this.
Your experience goes to show how broken the web site is, not even
returning the correct response code for the web server's refusing to
allow your user agent access.

Sincerely,
David