Tickets -- multiple browser tab warning?

[eFestivals]

This is simply See trying to limit the number of unnecessary refresh requests all hitting the server (load balancer), all of which the system is trying to honor, and therefore improve its overall performance somewhat.

"I'm not sure if using separate windows works the same or not, but I'm pretty certain that if you used a number of "private browsing" windows (which is available within Firefox, if not other browsers) they'd all work separately from each other."

Having multiple tabs open on the same browser or multiple browsers on the same machine would typically make no difference assuming that the server end is maintaining session processes based on IP (which would remain the same for each client). If the server end based its sessions on something at the application layer like the browser banner (very unlikely), then there might be an advantage in using different browsers from different vendors on the same machine.

The only way of using multiple browser sessions to your advantage is for them all to have a unique public IP, as each one of these will be dealt its own unique session ID by the server end. Thus, you will need to be refreshing from a number of different machines, each of which has its own unique, unshared, connection to the internet and therefore its own public IP and its own session on the server.

you couldn't work the sessions on the IP address - otherwise lots of peeps would end up getting other people's pages. Too many people (unknowingly) share the same IP, if that's how their ISP is working things.

[Pinhead]

Hmmm. Are you are referring to people sharing the same broadband router in the same house sort of thing?

Back in the day as everyone approached IPv4 address exhaustion ISP's did a lot of customer connection NAT'ing to share public IP's. Hell, all those modem pools relied upon it when we still used dial-up. These days I believe they have largely dispensed with this and use the seemingly infinite IPv6 address ranges for customer end points, only NAT'ing if they still need to if the customers device still only uses IPv4 (and then NAT'ing the v4 address to a v6 over a PPPoE link). Would this not make processing and differentiating clients by source IP more viable again?

Disclaimer: Having said all this though I have no idea exactly how See works it their end. I believe its a load balanced IIS6/7 cluster running on a bunch of hosted servers run by Virgin cloud providers now, but I know not how it was written and how it is configured.

[airwaves]

Ah, yes the virtual machine route is a really good idea - never considered that. VPN from that, across the virtual network bridge and out the shared gateway to work. Will try this - got a copy of VMware Workstation on home PC.

[**claire**]

I don't know why I always read these threads - I always get totally lost about halfway down the first page!

[Pinhead]

Apologies - I dont mean to be overtly technical but i'm interested to find out how its all done these days - hoping some web systems engineers might chip in and enlighten me as its been about 4 years since I last looked after any web farms for any company and consiquently i'm likely getting out of touch with how things are done these days.

See have to identify you somehow on their servers as a unique client. How do they do it? I thought IP Address, but maybe they feedback a temporary session cookie to your machine, or generate a temporary session for your browser using embedded code which is then routinely polled... dunno. Either way, might be useful to know cos then we might be able to infer what the better browser strategy could be come ticket day.

[**claire**]

No please carry on Pinhead - if I read it enough I'm hoping one day it'll start to sink in!

[ladybird33]

I wish i understood this thread! Fingers crossed F5 works on the day!

[Funkyfairy!]

Ok let me ask a really simple question - (dumb blonde alert) - last year I kept saying 'F5' works keep trying F5 (because I'd read it on here) and everyone else in our group said wait for the countdown - we did get tickets (luckily) but what does F5 actually do

yes let me take it back to basics

And is Pinead talking English ? Translation needed please :-)

[jamiejc]

Mmmm wonder what the chances of them making DNS cock up again??? editing the hosts file worked a treat...

One does wonder if it was done on purpose...

Edited September 17, 2013 by jamiejc

[UEF]

Nah, it's very easy to see why the DNS cockup happened. There's a commonly used IP address range you can use on internal networks that begins 192.168.0.x - when you work in systems you will have typed that in probably hundreds or thousands of times over the course of your life. See Tickets's one was meant to use 192.166.0.x or something very similar to that - force of habit made the cockup. There's no conspiracy.

[jamiejc]

Well with both Ip's set correctly ? it's going to sell out pretty damn fast!

[Pinhead]

Their DNS reg error is very unlikely to be repeated. Surprised they could even register an IP from the reserved IP ranges actually at the time...

You can either wait for the refresh timer on the See ticket site to refresh your page, or hit F5 to manually refresh. Experience suggests you are statistically slightly more likely to get the attention of the server if you hit F5 yourself every 15-20 seconds yourself.

[smudger]

er....right......and for the dumb ones out there, what's the conclusion? Private session in firefox using lots of open browser windows rather than tabs?

if that's rubbish you may as just well have one window open and keep refreshing that? If so what about using lots of PC's on the same network? Any point?

Incidentally there was a change listed here to stop firefox from recaching which was

'basically, just type about:config into the address bar - you should see a "here be dragons" warning. Accept, and then do a search for network.http.use-cache - when that comes up, right click and press toggle, then exit it.'

Is that worth doing?

Of course i fully understand the thread, just looking to making it clearer to those less enlightened than us IT nerds....

[Pinhead]

Enabling whatever page caching functionality is available in whatever browser you chose to use could in my opinion help by reducing the need to continually download any images or certain html formatting code upon each refresh. However, the See ticket page is usually deliberately simple and lean so the advantage gained will likely only be slight.

[Morse Code]

Enabling whatever page caching functionality is available in whatever browser you chose to use could in my opinion help by reducing the need to continually download any images or certain html formatting code upon each refresh. However, the See ticket page is usually deliberately simple and lean so the advantage gained will likely only be slight.

[frostypaw]

er....right......and for the dumb ones out there, what's the conclusion? Private session in firefox using lots of open browser windows rather than tabs?

if that's rubbish you may as just well have one window open and keep refreshing that? If so what about using lots of PC's on the same network? Any point?

Incidentally there was a change listed here to stop firefox from recaching which was

'basically, just type about:config into the address bar - you should see a "here be dragons" warning. Accept, and then do a search for network.http.use-cache - when that comes up, right click and press toggle, then exit it.'

Is that worth doing?

Of course i fully understand the thread, just looking to making it clearer to those less enlightened than us IT nerds....

[eFestivals]

Hmmm. Are you are referring to people sharing the same broadband router in the same house sort of thing?

Back in the day as everyone approached IPv4 address exhaustion ISP's did a lot of customer connection NAT'ing to share public IP's.

nope, I'm referring to what's in your second sentence. While it happens less now than it used to, it still happens a lot.

The best example that comes to mind - cos I encounter the problems it causes now and then - is that anyone within the NHS network uses the single IP address which is that network's gateway to the internet. Similar exists from quite a few govt departments too.

[eFestivals]

See have to identify you somehow on their servers as a unique client. How do they do it? I thought IP Address, but maybe they feedback a temporary session cookie to your machine, or generate a temporary session for your browser using embedded code which is then routinely polled... dunno. Either way, might be useful to know cos then we might be able to infer what the better browser strategy could be come ticket day.

I'd guess that they're using server sessions, as that's easy enough to implement and about as good as it can get. As I've said, the IP address idea can't be safely worked.

I'm not sure how sessions work within modern browsers, but it seems reasonable enough that any session might be shared across multiple tabs within one browser window. That's how See's system seems to work things, from what i've noticed previously.

[eFestivals]

Well with both Ip's set correctly ? it's going to sell out pretty damn fast!

in all previous sales they've "throttled" the sales system so that the tickets get sold over a pre-decided time-frame, rather than as fast as the system could sell them.

Based on what happened last year, my guess is that the sale was set-up to happen over 1 hour (but the DNS error delayed things), so I reckon that's what'll happen this time.

[Pinhead]

"The best example that comes to mind - cos I encounter the problems it causes now and then - is that anyone within the NHS network uses the single IP address which is that network's gateway to the internet. Similar exists from quite a few govt departments too."

Ah, I used to work for the NHS a few years ago and I think I might know why this might be. NHS hospitals, trusts and many other health services are typically linked to a network called the "N3", which is a private physical core circuit put in at immense cost which was already bandwidth challenged by the time it was completed! All the sites I dealt with had to go through this for their internet services as it was collectively monitored and controlled, and users complained endlessly about its performance, so much so that some trusts ended up putting in their own local gateways in total contravention of policy. The gateway from this network to the internet uses a small number of specific public IP's given to them by the government from a pool from one of the original Class A subnets awarded when the internet was a baby and huge IPv4 ranges were just wastefully given out to any old body that asked for them.

A quick Google for "NHS N3" will give a better description that my memory of the service. This is somewhat specific to this government body however, and to many businesses that NAT to just one or a few dynamically allocated public IP's. The majority of peeps will instead have just their one customer broadband IP allocated to them by their ISP. I would imagine also that access from business networks will be way down on a Sunday. Its a very valid point you make though that given that a sizable enough proportion of clients will be NAT'ed to a single public IP on some networks, that this would make it fairly useless for See to design their session control system around this aspect. It needs to be something far more unique, for example like a MAC address, but I would not think that they would bother sending ARP requests to query for this (which would probably be dropped by security systems anyway). Perhaps the UUID of your particular browser? Perhaps they just use something as simple as an http keep-alive poll though this would make your session very fragile once you have one on the server; very sensitive to time outs and server delays. Dunno.

Can you tell I'm bored today....

[LondonTom]

nope, I'm referring to what's in your second sentence. While it happens less now than it used to, it still happens a lot.

The best example that comes to mind - cos I encounter the problems it causes now and then - is that anyone within the NHS network uses the single IP address which is that network's gateway to the internet. Similar exists from quite a few govt departments too.

[matt_berr]

Ok, this is kinda what I do for living.

What everyone is trying to do is get a connection from their PC to one of two seeticket public facing servers.

See tickets have two levels controlling who gets a connection:

1. Webscreen - which awards each IP (internet connection) a rating based on whether it has visited in the past (good) and whether it appears to be flooding (sending too much traffic = bad), it will then block traffic as seetickets get busy - allowing through the traffic with the highest rating.

2. ADC Stingrays - Once you have got past the webscreen the Stingrays will either present you a holding page based on current load (I got this last year and it was a glasto page telling you to refresh in x) or take you to buy a ticket. If you refresh on the holding page it takes you back to step 1 - kinda pointless page. I have a theory regarding appending the rest of the ticket purchase URL at this point, however, stingrays are smart and expensive.

So the best tactics are:

* Visit the registration site a couple of times in the days leading up to the sale, this will increase your webscreen rating (I was in 2 minds whether to share this as the more people that do it the less effective it is)

* Have many people trying from different locations, there may be some advantage from using a mobile hotspot from your mobile (reason is you will be sharing an IP with lots of other users which should have a decent rating or may even be whitelisted so webscreen cannot block it)

* Use multiple browsers rather than multiple tabs in a browser - i.e. chrome, safari and firefox - refresh regularly using ctrl+F5 (forces a complete refresh)

* Be there at the very start as in theory that is the point where there is the most amount of free sessions (100%) up for grabs.

I am hoping that the numbers who are reading this board is a fairly small percentage of the total who try so this should increase our chances.

There are a couple of things I am looking at that may also increase the chances - if I find a way to do it and its appropriate I'll share.

And yes, I do think its unfair that for Glastonbury people like me with this type of knowledge get an advantage, but I'll take it and share it.

[eFestivals]

I guess with the Thursday sale, someone could attempt to load a page and look at any session ID's set in the cookies to see at least what they are doing on the user side

server sessions don't require the use of cookies, so I'm not sure you'd find anything.

[phillyfaddle]

And yes, I do think its unfair that for Glastonbury people like me with this type of knowledge get an advantage, but I'll take it and share it.

[Pinhead]

Ok, this is kinda what I do for living.

What everyone is trying to do is get a connection from their PC to one of two seeticket public facing servers.

See tickets have two levels controlling who gets a connection:

1. Webscreen - which awards each IP (internet connection) a rating based on whether it has visited in the past (good) and whether it appears to be flooding (sending too much traffic = bad), it will then block traffic as seetickets get busy - allowing through the traffic with the highest rating.

2. ADC Stingrays - Once you have got past the webscreen the Stingrays will either present you a holding page based on current load (I got this last year and it was a glasto page telling you to refresh in x) or take you to buy a ticket. If you refresh on the holding page it takes you back to step 1 - kinda pointless page. I have a theory regarding appending the rest of the ticket purchase URL at this point, however, stingrays are smart and expensive.

So the best tactics are:

* Visit the registration site a couple of times in the days leading up to the sale, this will increase your webscreen rating (I was in 2 minds whether to share this as the more people that do it the less effective it is)

* Have many people trying from different locations, there may be some advantage from using a mobile hotspot from your mobile (reason is you will be sharing an IP with lots of other users which should have a decent rating or may even be whitelisted so webscreen cannot block it)

* Use multiple browsers rather than multiple tabs in a browser - i.e. chrome, safari and firefox - refresh regularly using ctrl+F5 (forces a complete refresh)

* Be there at the very start as in theory that is the point where there is the most amount of free sessions (100%) up for grabs.

I am hoping that the numbers who are reading this board is a fairly small percentage of the total who try so this should increase our chances.

There are a couple of things I am looking at that may also increase the chances - if I find a way to do it and its appropriate I'll share.

And yes, I do think its unfair that for Glastonbury people like me with this type of knowledge get an advantage, but I'll take it and share it.