I always laugh whenever I visit Hewlett-Packard‘s website. I have no idea what kind of crazy spaghetti computer systems they have running the site, but URLs of the format h20000.www2.hp.com make me imagine that the site is being fronted with Apache running on OpenVMS/VAX, with the back-end running Nonstop on a Tandem minicomputer. (All products that HP owns.)
I received the following error message today:
Message from the ISAPI plugin:
No backend server available for connection: timed out after 10 seconds or idempotent set to OFF.
Build date/time: Jun 15 2006Change Number: 779505
I dearly hope idempotent is not set to OFF. Unless HP/UX really is that bad and you need to keep trying so that at some point you’ll get the answer you were looking for. (“1+1=3 … nope. 1+1=4 … nope. 1+1=2 … ah-ha!”)
Incidentally, i was trying to determine the oldest server that we still have in operation. We still have a few PA-RISC-based HP 9000 A-class systems running HP/UX; they’ve probably been past their prime now for about 7 years. I’ll let you know if I find anything older!