Disappearing Graphics

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So on any page about 40% of the graphics are missing, including avatars and emoticons. I've been using Google chrome both on my iPad and computer and it's happening on both. Thoughts?
 

Sarramy Valtiele

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I've not had any problems with it at all. I use Chrome as well.
 

Kelgan al'Moranwin

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Is your main computer a mac?
 
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I'm with Sarramy...Chrome with no issues. I'd ask about the newest version, but it seems Chrome automatically updates when you close it.
 
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Nope, my main computer is not a mac.

Hmm seems to be fixed on my computer, and the iPad is up to about 75% visible graphics. Weird.
 
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Azi al'Thone

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Try to clear cache / force refresh. Not sure on the iPad, but if you go to settings, Safari... and something like clear or delete cache / temporary files, that should do it.
 

Elorenya d'Rahien

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FWIW, Dareth has this happen a LOT on his laptop -- Win7, Chrome. Force refresh often fixes the page he's specifically on, but it reoccurs immediately on the next page he loads; not sure if he's tried manually clearing the cache or not. I'll see if I can get him to do so and also to get me the version# for his Chrome... He says TV.net is the only site it happens to, though, which makes him wonder about the server settings for the website. :cheeseeni:
 

Azi al'Thone

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I'd have to see it reproduced myself to be sure, or remote into someone's computer who is getting it. It's most likely client side from what I can tell so far, but if more people report the same thing recently, maybe we're having bandwidth issues at some level :cheeseeni:.

How long has this been happening?
 

Elorenya d'Rahien

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He says on-and-off for the past couple of months. I've seen it pretty rarely on my computer, but I have seen it as well. :cheeseeni:

His version of Chrome is 27.0.1453.94m (Win7, as mentioned). Dunno if he's permitted to allow remote access; I sincerely doubt it, since it's a corporate laptop... :laugh: Are there any diagnostics I can get him to provide in lieu? Screenshots are obvious but near-worthless, but I dunno -- ping, tracert?
 

Azi al'Thone

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Nope nope, but if he's adept, open dev tools (F12) and inspect the source where the images should be. It'll give a <img> tag (or some other tag perhaps). Chrome dev tools should let you grab that src URL and then you can put that into another tab. If you get it then, reload the original page and see if the image loads again. Looking at the "Network" tab also shows a line item for each request, including images, etc. Find that image file and see what the status is. If it's HTTP 200, then it downloaded. HTTP... something... else would be loaded from cache. HTTP 404 means the browser couldn't find it.
 
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FWIW, Dareth has this happen a LOT on his laptop -- Win7, Chrome. Force refresh often fixes the page he's specifically on, but it reoccurs immediately on the next page he loads; not sure if he's tried manually clearing the cache or not. I'll see if I can get him to do so and also to get me the version# for his Chrome... He says TV.net is the only site it happens to, though, which makes him wonder about the server settings for the website. :cheeseeni:

Same thing for me. Ctrl+F5 always fixes it.
 

Elorenya d'Rahien

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Sweet. I'll pass the info along, Azi Gaidin. :hug Probably won't be until Monday at least that I have results for you; we're going away for a significant chunk of the weekend starting this afternoon. :pleased-1:
 
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Would a screenshot of it happening help this situation or would it do nothing? (I'm NOT a tech person).
 

Elorenya d'Rahien

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Nope nope, but if he's adept, open dev tools (F12) and inspect the source where the images should be. It'll give a <img> tag (or some other tag perhaps). Chrome dev tools should let you grab that src URL and then you can put that into another tab. If you get it then, reload the original page and see if the image loads again. Looking at the "Network" tab also shows a line item for each request, including images, etc. Find that image file and see what the status is. If it's HTTP 200, then it downloaded. HTTP... something... else would be loaded from cache. HTTP 404 means the browser couldn't find it.

When trying to open any given SRC URL, he's getting a 412 - Precondition Failed on his first attempt. If he reloads the image-in-its-own-tab, it will THEN load the image correctly. If he loads a second SRC URL, he gets another 412 from cache on the image-in-its-own-tab. It doesn't specify that it's the local cache, though that's presumable.

He disabled his cache and reloaded the page again, and the 412s disappeared. He then clicked to another page, and got more broken images -- more 412s. Another disable of cache and reload, and the images appear.

He's going to post in a sec with a more cogent discussion of theory here. :)
 

Dareth d'Rahien

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I don't know why the 412 is happening in the first place, but "precondition failed" makes me think that there's some kind of hotlink-prevention referrer-checking going on (that I am failing the first time each evening I try to load the site, for some reason). For whatever reason, the site thinks there's some reason that I shouldn't be able to retrieve those images until I try again. And then, Chrome is treating the 412 as cacheable (or the server is marking it as such), so a simple F5 won't help. (Having the server use a "no-cache" CacheControl header for the 412 response would fix this.)

Is there some anti-hotlinking plugin installed on the vBulletin site that might be going a bit haywire?
 

Azi al'Thone

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Holy crap - that's weird. I've never seen a 412 response code before :brown-blink:. Based on my research, it's something that the server can respond with when the client send a precondition header - and I don't think vBulletin does any of that anyways. This sounds like a server side issue... But first and foremost... what images are not appearing? If they're not hosted on www.tarvalon.net then there's nothing we have control over with that, unfortunately.

Also, if you can get me the full request headers and response headers I would be able to look at more :)
 

Elorenya d'Rahien

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Me, either. :laugh:

Any/all images hosted on tarvalon.net, from what I've seen staring over his shoulder -- from the graphic with the city of Tar Valon at the top, to the read/unread icons on the main page, to the "go to first unread" icon, to the emoticons, to the avatars and images in that box, to the reply/reply with quote/quote+ buttons, to the graphics in the editor at the bottom of the page, etc etc.

I'm about 99% sure he hasn't gotten a single 412 from an image hosted elsewhere (e.g., people's sigs), but I'll ask him to verify when he's grabbing the request and response headers for you. :)
 

Azi al'Thone

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I am so glad you guys know what you are doing to some extent :laugh:
 

Elorenya d'Rahien

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Ahaha, yeah, that does always make things easier. ;) Dareth's a software engineer and I did tech support (admittedly mostly with proprietary stuff, rather than generalized IT) for most of a decade before starting the stay-at-home-mom gig. :) Troubleshooting is a thing we do! :D
 

Dareth d'Rahien

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Alright. It started happening again. I opened up the Chrome toolkit and loaded a page, and found a few elements that were getting a 412 from my cache, and one that got a 412 directly from the server. So that's the one I'm providing data for here - the request was for /images/smilies/cheeseeni.gif.

Headers:
Request:

GET /images/smilies/cheeseeni.gif HTTP/1.1
Host: www.tarvalon.net
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36
Referer: http://www.tarvalon.net/showthread.php?9043-The-Last-Post-on-Page-100-Wins!-Best-Game-EVER!!/page43
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Cookie: (redacted)
If-None-Match: "1471573347"
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 12 May 2010 07:17:42 UTC


Response:

HTTP/1.1 412 Precondition Failed
Expires: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 09:07:49 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=14400
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "1471573347"
Last-Modified: Wed, 12 May 2010 07:17:42 GMT
Content-Length: 365
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 05:07:49 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.26
Response:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>412 - Precondition Failed</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>412 - Precondition Failed</h1>
</body>
</html>

I redacted the "Cookie" header due to it looking like it contains password hash data. If you need the cookies sent with the request, let me know and I'll PM them to you.
 
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