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geeky techie chat about the ticket sale


Swine_Glasto2014
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no..i wouldn't have been totally confident...which is why i sweated over the ticket i bought this way in the resale....for the main sale i had already decided that if the link worked i wouldn't use it unless i was getting nowhere with the standard route...which to be honest i was thinking would be around the 40 minute mark. good job i didn't have to rely on it seeing as it sold out after 27 minutes then!

given that the direct connection to the other server disappeared seconds before the main sale on Sunday i'd say they have spotted it/me/them/us and have taken steps to close it off. as i've mentioned earlier it came back within 10 minutes of the 'sold out' being declared and still works now.

Interesting, is it possible that these extra servers / IP addresses were used to host the regular seetickets.com website while the glasto sale was on? Did anyone on here try to access seetickets.com? I would guess they wouldn't want the whole site offline due to the massive hits to the normal servers. Did you happen to notice which IP address you were connected to when you were successful in getting your tickets?

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This. More often than not I end up making the purchase, but it's because I try harder. You can also get a 'feel' if a website is going to respond or not and when it's worth going back and resubmitting rather than waiting. I can't explain it.

Ah yes, of course! I am such an idiot, but now, after reading 20 pages of a techie thread that goes mostly over my head, but mostly states it's down to luck, I've finally found the answer to why I haven't seen a booking page for years despite hammering manically at my laptop each passing ticket day (in North London, btw) - I am simply not trying hard enough. Not as hard as UEF, anyway. That explains everything. Serves me right (server pun intended).

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Because strong, regional accents such as the North East and North West stand out. Southern accents tend to be softer (with perhaps the exception of cockney) and aren't noticed so much?

As a West Country lad, anything north of Exeter stands out to me. I suspect people from the North East or West would probably argue that there's loads of 'bloody southerners' at the Festival because the southern accents stand out more to them.

Like you say, it's perceived. By you.

Yeah, this year I thought everyone was a southerner. Other than our group, a big group from Leicester and a couple of scousers we met, everyone was a southerner.

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Without getting into the semantics of what is fair and what isn't....my method worked for first few minutes of the coach sale, as it did for the resale back in April...after which the connection seemed to be blocked and resulted in resolution errors. It didn't work at all yesterday so the tickets I bought were as fairly gained as any other.

For my interest I would like to know how See detected the connection to the 'spare' server and dropped it. Perhaps they merely took that service off-line for the duration knowing that folks like me would have an advantage by using it.

I was gutted when they took those two "cheeky" servers off line, it was shaping up to be the quickest t-day ever.

Glad it worked for you on coach tickets day, I will certainly keep my eye on it for the resale.

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Interesting, is it possible that these extra servers / IP addresses were used to host the regular seetickets.com website while the glasto sale was on? Did anyone on here try to access seetickets.com? I would guess they wouldn't want the whole site offline due to the massive hits to the normal servers. Did you happen to notice which IP address you were connected to when you were successful in getting your tickets?

I was taking to someone who works for the company who managed the traffic (for want of a better phrase) for the ticket sale, he did mentioned that they partition off a server to cope with the rest of the site for the duration of the Glastonbury sale so the above sounds likely.

Was a very interesting chat actually, I will go for more detail the next time I catch up with him as I am sure there's plenty of interesting stuff to learn.

What he did say however was that (other than 2014's one off "back door") there is no way to "cheat" the system.

Edited by TheNewUnion
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This is true, but the only way I can think of getting into See Tickets' servers is to either hack them, or be given direct access by them.

Agreed, but then again I'd say changing your host file to surreptitiously gain access to a specific server is hacking. Social engineering is hacking, basically if you manage to cheat the system, then you have hacked it!

sshot4fccd936f382f.jpg

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Agreed, but then again I'd say changing your host file to surreptitiously gain access to a specific server is hacking. Social engineering is hacking, basically if you manage to cheat the system, then you have hacked it!

sshot4fccd936f382f.jpg

Not really, as it's a publicly available IP address, you've just forced your computer to attempt access to it, rather than being directed by something else.

You've still been given access to that machine by them.

E.g. you could try to guess/hack the Admin password and log onto that machine with greater privilege, perhaps then creating other users who could directly log on as well.

Frankly, why you'd want to risk jail for Glastonbury tickets, rather than just hitting F5 hundreds of times..... :D

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I didn't get tickets having successfully got tickets every year since 2002 (although sat out 2009 and 2014).

As there were no backdoors this year, assuming you were organised enough to be on-line at 0900 and had a connection and a browser you had as much chance as anyone else. It is luck.

Saying that, the whole setup sort of favours large groups going. Wouldn't surprise me if there was a maximum of 4 tickets next year.

In what way is it an advantage having 6 on the form instead of 4 ?

If anything it would be a disdvantage. It takes more time to input the details of 6 than say 2 meaning a delay in getting to final payment, as there is no 'lock' on tickets then the faster you get to payment the better chance you have of securing tickets.

On top of that there is a greater chance of error - someone giving you the wrong reg number etc.

If it is to do with more people trying then that still would be the same regardless of how many you can put on one form.

Personally I think you should be able to book up to say 20 on one form. Only getting tickets for half your group is pretty shitty. (but obviously better than getting none if your one of the lucky ones).

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A system has not yet been built which cannot be cheated...

That's true. I'm sure his implication wasn't that they implemented an uncrackable system (perhaps it's time to get Mitnick on the case for T day next year)

I was chatting to him online again today, need to catch up with him properly sometime soon and get the inside scoop on the plans for next year.

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If it is to do with more people trying then that still would be the same regardless of how many you can put on one form.

Personally I think you should be able to book up to say 20 on one form. Only getting tickets for half your group is pretty shitty. (but obviously better than getting none if your one of the lucky ones).

Well it's always going to favour groups of the exact size of whatever the limit is. A group of six with everyone trying has 2x the chance of getting in as a group of three with everyone trying, and 6x the chance of someone trying for themselves. Likewise a group of eight need two successful transactions, so are only as likely to get everyone in as a group of four.

There's other reasons not to go up to 20 though, one would be over-cautious banks. Suddenly spending £1000 on SeeTickets in one go is more likely to have them flag the transaction, reject it and call you to check it's okay. And using Verified by Visa etc. to avoid that would add yet more time and load to the process.

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In what way is it an advantage having 6 on the form instead of 4 ?

If anything it would be a disdvantage. It takes more time to input the details of 6 than say 2 meaning a delay in getting to final payment, as there is no 'lock' on tickets then the faster you get to payment the better chance you have of securing tickets.

On top of that there is a greater chance of error - someone giving you the wrong reg number etc.

If it is to do with more people trying then that still would be the same regardless of how many you can put on one form.

Personally I think you should be able to book up to say 20 on one form. Only getting tickets for half your group is pretty shitty. (but obviously better than getting none if your one of the lucky ones).

20? Look at you with all your friends! :P Edited by stuartbert two hats
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he did mentioned that they partition off a server to cope with the rest of the site for the duration of the Glastonbury sale so the above sounds likely.

We've been discussing this in another thread. I think its understood that they don't simply have one server (or even three, corresponding to the DNS entries), but rather a pool with a load balancer (someone posted a link to a loadbalancing company that had see as one of their case studies). Handling 10's of thousands of connections with DB connectors is tricky business, let alone 300,000.

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We've been discussing this in another thread. I think its understood that they don't simply have one server (or even three, corresponding to the DNS entries), but rather a pool with a load balancer (someone posted a link to a loadbalancing company that had see as one of their case studies). Handling 10's of thousands of connections with DB connectors is tricky business, let alone 300,000.

Yep more likely the 3 IP addresses are 3 physical load balancers with 10's or even 100's of virtual servers behind it. Depending on how the load balancer is configured it should send traffic to the least busy server so even if you circumvented the load balancers and went straight to a server you would be no better off.

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Yep more likely the 3 IP addresses are 3 physical load balancers with 10's or even 100's of virtual servers behind it. Depending on how the load balancer is configured it should send traffic to the least busy server so even if you circumvented the load balancers and went straight to a server you would be no better off.

We did discuss in the other thread how LB's tend to try and create "sticky sessions" so you can often find yourself stuck to a server that's unresponsive. In certain scenarios having the least number of connections can actually be because you're not handling them, and therefore just closing them.

That said, the backends are likely not publicly addressable.

We should form a company morph, rebuild glastos ticketing system for a million quid or so, reckon we could do it for half that, and split the 500k 50-50!

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We did discuss in the other thread how LB's tend to try and create "sticky sessions" so you can often find yourself stuck to a server that's unresponsive. In certain scenarios having the least number of connections can actually be because you're not handling them, and therefore just closing them.

That said, the backends are likely not publicly addressable.

We should form a company morph, rebuild glastos ticketing system for a million quid or so, reckon we could do it for half that, and split the 500k 50-50!

Unresponsive backend servers should be spotted by the load-balancer where a 'keep-alive' is configured to poll the back end routinely in a number of ways, the simplest being a ping. For a web service its more efficient to configure a L7 keep-alive that actually asks for an HTTP200 response to a URL.

If the keep-alive fails after a predetermined amount of retrys the LB drops it from the server-farm and doesn't send any more connection requests to it until the keep-alive determines it's alive again.

the sticky session is there to ensure that a user connection is maintained throughout the transaction to the same server...where there are multiple servers in the farm....it is usually L3 source IP and cookie based. If the server goes down during the session all connections to that server are dropped by the LB and the sticky table for them is cleared out,...forcing customers to another server when they reconnect for a new session. in badly designed systems the sticky is maintained and clients continue trying to get to the dead server either until the sticky table is manually cleaned by an admin, or the sticky session cookie times out, the timeout being determined by the admin..

well designed systems will use a public IP which is routed to the LB...and then NAT'd to private IP's within the LB configuration for the backend server-farm.

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Unresponsive backend servers should be spotted by the load-balancer where a 'keep-alive' is configured to poll the back end routinely in a number of ways, the simplest being a ping. For a web service its more efficient to configure a L7 keep-alive that actually asks for an HTTP200 response to a URL.

Correct, but that's not to say that the data that is returned is correct. it could be a "200 Okay - heres a webpage outlying why I couldn't get anything from the database" or "200 - Okay, content-length 0!". Close connection, quick, give me another!

but yes the rest is the point I'm making.

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oh and its not necessarily the case you need a keep alive. Some of them will do healthchecking with an L7 examination of the users sessions.

interesting...they examine the user session to determine its healthy and ongoing rather than asking the backend if its alive?

what have you worked on...CISCO CSS11501 and CISCO ACE4710 here....moved on now so my knowledge is starting to get a bit blurry round the edges...

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I'm slightly disappointed that many of the people I've always viewed, based their usernames and avatars, to be wild eyed loners at the gates of oblivion on the last freedom moped out of nowhere city are actually IT types with a penchant for discussing IP addresses.

:P

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I'm slightly disappointed that many of the people I've always viewed, based their usernames and avatars, to be wild eyed loners at the gates of oblivion on the last freedom moped out of nowhere city are actually IT types with a penchant for discussing IP addresses.

:P

Hey I'll have you know that avatar is genuinely me! but yes I think I fall into that second category more than the first!

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