[LON-CAPA-admin] Problem possibly involving "multiple attempts"?

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi,

The most likely reason is spyware.

The second most likely is cookies expiring too quickly or not being  
accepted correctly.

The third most likely is an ill-configured webcache server on the  
network. Some providers and schools have a webcache on their  
boundaries that attempts to "speed up" network traffic into the  
domain by caching the pages and intercepting the requests. LON-CAPA  
sends out headers and expiration dates that should tell every well- 
configured webcache server to NOT cache the pages, but some webcaches  
are not well-configured.

- Gerd.

On Jun 23, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Neubauer, Paul R. wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Has anyone else had a problem similar to this?
>
> We had a couple of students yesterday (Sunday) afternoon who both  
> reported being unable to do assignments. The system load was light.  
> One student reported "it will say "successful login"  but then  
> nothing else will load and it won't let me access other parts of  
> the site." Another said that the system "consistently freezes up,  
> kicks me off, or doesn't allow me to submit an answer." The second  
> later reported that "It seems that it has trouble registering every  
> time I get an answer incorrect when it allows multiple attempts.  
> The program is perfect when answers are correct, but when I get  
> many chances it likes to freeze up."  I don't know if the first of  
> the two noticed anything similar, but they were in the same class  
> and doing similar assignments.
>
> I notice that both of these students got a significant number of  
> "302" http return codes (for multiple questions) and I don't know  
> if that is possibly related. OTOH, I did a "grep -c " 302 " acc* "  
> to see if the number of 302s was abnormally high, and it seemed to  
> be pretty comparable for the current access_log and for past logs  
> (compared to the number of lines in the logs), so I'm not  
> particularly convinced that this had anything to do with the  
> problems they were experiencing.
>
> Both of the students said that they had not had this problem in the  
> past, so I can't tell if it was something to do with the specific  
> assignment or something else.
>
> We're still running lon-capa version 2.5.3.
>
> Does any of this ring any bells?
>
> Thanks,
> Paul
>
> _______________________________________________
> LON-CAPA-admin mailing list
> LON-CAPA-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
> http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/listinfo/lon-capa-admin