[pca] wget fails to communicate to sunsolve

[Martin Paul]

Hi,

> I do have a sun support contract and I am failing to download patch on this box
> ...
> Reusing existing connection to sunsolve.sun.com:80.
> HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 500 Internal Server Error
> 2009-02-04 17:02:01 ERROR 500: Internal Server Error.

Everything's fine with pca, wget and your account, the problem is on the 
SunSolve side. It's an issue which is not uncommon, and has been 
reported multiple times over the years. It not only happens when using 
pca/wget, but also when accessing SunSolve via a browser interactively 
from time to time. The theory is:

When pca connects to the sunsolve.sun.com server to download a patch, it 
is really connecting to a load balancer, which directs the download 
request to one of the machines in sunsolve's server pool. Sometimes one 
of the machines in the pool is broken, returning "internal server error" 
all the time until it is fixed/rebooted/whatever by Sun staff.

As different users get directed at different servers, only some have 
problems, while everything works fine for everybody else.

Now another part of the problem is that the load balancer seems to cache 
information about which IP is directed to which server, so you get 
directed to the same (broken) server all the time. So the only thing you 
can do is to wait for either the broken machine to be fixed (no one 
knows how long this takes) or wait long enough to make the cached 
information on the load balancer to be thrown away (a few hours or maybe 
a day).

Sun knows about it, and they promised to look into this.

Martin.