June 2018

[DareToDibble]

Like most have said - I haven't missed it as much in the knowledge that the festival wasn't on. It would have been horrible if it was on and I'd just not gotten tickets. Greg James played a prank on people on Radio 1... Played a live Killers set and when it finished came back saying "The Killers, live from Glastonbury - what a weekend. That festival really is the greatest on earth and I feel so lucky to have been there again this year" or words to that effect. Although I knew it was a joke it still got to me!
I attended Ed Sheeran and The Killers 1 day after the other ovver Glastonbury weekend which helped, as well as moving home to Cardiff the week after so that's been a welcome distraction, too.

The panic of ticket day has already set in and I can't decide if it'll be harder this year due to more people trying after the fallow year as they're all suffering like us. Or easier as a lot of the "casuals" will forget.

I never went in 2013, did it feel any easier/harder than normal?

[Havors]

On 7/14/2018 at 11:20 PM, Tyonks said:

Back on topic, when I log in this website I miss it more. Also going to Queens of the Stone Age at Finsbury Park meant I had a lot of pants for Glastonbury following that taster. I'm going to Canada for 2 weeks in September though, so every cloud etc etc. 

 

Edit: I've also noticed a lot of people mention they didn't get tickets for 2013. 2013 was the only year that I didn't get tickets when I've tried. A little concerning as that was also after the fallow year! 

Regarding tickets.... Whats the trick? for 2017 I had a white page for an hour until they were sold out. Constant refreshing never once see anything resembling a website. Luckily my brother managed to get through on his phone or we wouldnt have gone. I am having anxiety about October and not getting through big time ha

[DareToDibble]

41 minutes ago, Havors said:

Regarding tickets.... Whats the trick? for 2017 I had a white page for an hour until they were sold out. Constant refreshing never once see anything resembling a website. Luckily my brother managed to get through on his phone or we wouldnt have gone. I am having anxiety about October and not getting through big time ha

 

Edited July 16, 2018 by DareToDibble

[Havors]

4 minutes ago, DareToDibble said:

 

Haha yeah I was trying that... i worry if i refresh too fast ill refresh it when im on holding page and fuck it all up! Is it just a bash the button and hope for the best? 

[Tyonks]

10 hours ago, Havors said:

Regarding tickets.... Whats the trick? for 2017 I had a white page for an hour until they were sold out. Constant refreshing never once see anything resembling a website. Luckily my brother managed to get through on his phone or we wouldnt have gone. I am having anxiety about October and not getting through big time ha

Out of the 4 times I've been, Mrs Yonks got tickets on her phone 3 of the times........

[Curlygirl]

Honestly... I haven’t missed it this year, I’ve just smiled a lot when I’ve read people’s memories. I’ve discovered new festivals, new friends, and so far had a bloody good summer! 5 more festivals to attend as well as a trip to the farm and a camping trip in Weymouth. 2018 has been a fab year. 

I’m incredibly scared for Tday already. I’ve been having mad Glastonbury dreams for months. None of them have good endings ?. 

[Havors]

On 7/17/2018 at 12:21 AM, Tyonks said:

Out of the 4 times I've been, Mrs Yonks got tickets on her phone 3 of the times........

Im going to go to great lengths to try having a good few different connection types.. 1 on my normal wifi, 1 on VPN, 1 on 4G, 1 on 3G and HSPA if possible haha 

Going to be hard refreshing 4 screens at the same time though

[Quark]

My brother is interested for next year.  We did Download in '16 and I'm taking him to Beautiful Days this year, so using that as his training wheels. Conversation at ours on Saturday:

Brother: So how do we get tickets for Glastonbury then?

Me: Well...

Mrs Q: (cutting across me) You basically spend the Sunday morning sat in your pants surrounded by laptops and phones pressing F5 until you win.

Brother: (eyes widening somewhat) Oh. Right.

I didn't really have to bother adding anything.  He does work in IT so he got all excited about setting up a stack at work, but I pointed out the Eavii's dim view of such approaches. You'd like him @stuartbert two hats.

[stuartbert two hats]

5 minutes ago, Quark said:

My brother is interested for next year.  We did Download in '16 and I'm taking him to Beautiful Days this year, so using that as his training wheels. Conversation at ours on Saturday:

Brother: So how do we get tickets for Glastonbury then?

Me: Well...

Mrs Q: (cutting across me) You basically spend the Sunday morning sat in your pants surrounded by laptops and phones pressing F5 until you win.

Brother: (eyes widening somewhat) Oh. Right.

I didn't really have to bother adding anything.  He does work in IT so he got all excited about setting up a stack at work, but I pointed out the Eavii's dim view of such approaches. You'd like him @stuartbert two hats.

Fuck that shit, I'm strongly considering a multi-IP, Azure+AWS based attack this year.  

[Quark]

Just now, stuartbert two hats said:

Fuck that shit, I'm strongly considering a multi-IP, Azure+AWS based attack this year.  

Holy shit you'd REALLY like him.  Might just leave you two to natter while I get wrecked.

[Havors]

3 hours ago, stuartbert two hats said:

Fuck that shit, I'm strongly considering a multi-IP, Azure+AWS based attack this year.  

I am thinking of asking some of the guys in our Dev team to whip something up. Or at least giving me the low down on when to refresh and when not to... there's shit that goes on behind the scenes with the queuing system I think I heard once. 

Problem is last year the site was down for a while so doesnt matter what you do if they cant handle the load. 

[FuzzyDunlop]

T-DAY.... I'm not around. I am relying on people to get through. They are all our crew who will take it seriously, but I am fucking shitting it!!

[Havors]

10 minutes ago, FuzzyDunlop said:

T-DAY.... I'm not around. I am relying on people to get through. They are all our crew who will take it seriously, but I am fucking shitting it!!

Not around? surely you have a phone? even in timbuktu! every little helps? haha 

[Pinhead]

4 hours ago, Havors said:

I am thinking of asking some of the guys in our Dev team to whip something up. Or at least giving me the low down on when to refresh and when not to... there's shit that goes on behind the scenes with the queuing system I think I heard once. 

Problem is last year the site was down for a while so doesnt matter what you do if they cant handle the load. 

Which would do what exactly.

Success in getting the attention of See's ticketing system is conditioned by their setup, not yours.

Azure or AWS become just another See client. The connectivity topology is not the limiting factor.

[stuartbert two hats]

58 minutes ago, Pinhead said:

Which would do what exactly.

Success in getting the attention of See's ticketing system is conditioned by their setup, not yours.

Azure or AWS become just another See client. The connectivity topology is not the limiting factor.

My thinking is it increases the number of clients, like connecting via 4G and WiFi. Get a different VM in each region and you've increased your chances. That's the idea anyway, I'm interested to hear why it's bollocks though.

 

[Pinhead]

If you can afford to stand up a whole load of clients on each platform and in different regions then maybe it could have an advantage (assuming they all have different public IP's). I have seen scant little evidence over the last few years that having multiple clients makes all that much, if any, impact. It can be a diminishing returns situation as well as the more you have to manage, the more you have to refresh, check on etc. The only type of client that I have seen that 'seems' to have an advantage is a mobile (3/4G) one, though I'm happy to confess that it could just be confirmation bias that has led me to think this.

[Havors]

14 hours ago, Pinhead said:

Which would do what exactly.

Success in getting the attention of See's ticketing system is conditioned by their setup, not yours.

Azure or AWS become just another See client. The connectivity topology is not the limiting factor.

 

24 minutes ago, Pinhead said:

If you can afford to stand up a whole load of clients on each platform and in different regions then maybe it could have an advantage (assuming they all have different public IP's). I have seen scant little evidence over the last few years that having multiple clients makes all that much, if any, impact. It can be a diminishing returns situation as well as the more you have to manage, the more you have to refresh, check on etc. The only type of client that I have seen that 'seems' to have an advantage is a mobile (3/4G) one, though I'm happy to confess that it could just be confirmation bias that has led me to think this.

I'm not talking about clients i.e. Chrome, Firefox.... Im talking about different IP's and different gateways... The more you use the higher chance you have of one connecting.

 

[stuartbert two hats]

8 minutes ago, Pinhead said:

If you can afford to stand up a whole load of clients on each platform and in different regions then maybe it could have an advantage (assuming they all have different public IP's). I have seen scant little evidence over the last few years that having multiple clients makes all that much, if any, impact. It can be a diminishing returns situation as well as the more you have to manage, the more you have to refresh, check on etc. The only type of client that I have seen that 'seems' to have an advantage is a mobile (3/4G) one, though I'm happy to confess that it could just be confirmation bias that has led me to think this.

Yeah.  In years gone by where each refresh could take several seconds, this plan made more sense.  I was never convinced that refreshing  the page whilst it was reloading, as that seemed a good way to lose a potential chance to buy tickets .  Now that refreshes are sub-second and mashing F5 really is a decent strategy, I'm somewhat unconvinced by my own plan.  I'll consider anything to get an edge though.

 

11 minutes ago, Havors said:

I'm not talking about clients i.e. Chrome, Firefox.... Im talking about different IP's and different gateways... The more you use the higher chance you have of one connecting.

 

I'm pretty sure Pinhead wasn't talking about browsers when referencing "clients".  You seem to be on the same page to me.

[Havors]

1 minute ago, stuartbert two hats said:

Yeah.  In years gone by where each refresh could take several seconds, this plan made more sense.  I was never convinced that refreshing  the page whilst it was reloading, as that seemed a good way to lose a potential chance to buy tickets .  Now that refreshes are sub-second and mashing F5 really is a decent strategy, I'm somewhat unconvinced by my own plan.  I'll consider anything to get an edge though.

 

I'm pretty sure Pinhead wasn't talking about browsers when referencing "clients".  You seem to be on the same page to me.

See Tickets use a certain system/queuing/hierarchy for sorting their traffic... there is a guy I know who says he knows how to "exploit" or maximise his chances... He wont for love nor money share how though haha! He has gotten tickets every year for like the last 15 glasto's on the bounce. He may be full of shit but who knows. 

[eFestivals]

55 minutes ago, Pinhead said:

The only type of client that I have seen that 'seems' to have an advantage is a mobile (3/4G) one, though I'm happy to confess that it could just be confirmation bias that has led me to think this.

I'm wondering if it seemingly gives an advantage because people tend to use them as a secondary device for trying or tickets - cos there's a lot of stories that say "I switched to my mobile and got straight thru".

So I'm thinking if people tried on their mobile firstly and then switched to desktop, we'd get people saying "I switched to my desktop and got straight thru"?

Maybe a consequence from something within the See Tickets set-up?

[eFestivals]

29 minutes ago, Havors said:

I'm not talking about clients i.e. Chrome, Firefox.... Im talking about different IP's and different gateways... The more you use the higher chance you have of one connecting.

not necessarily true.

If there's nothing to filter IPs on See's system then it's purely luck - you get thru when you get thru, where your packet happens to be the one that arrives at precisely the right moment to be able to get thru.

 

[Havors]

9 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

not necessarily true.

If there's nothing to filter IPs on See's system then it's purely luck - you get thru when you get thru, where your packet happens to be the one that arrives at precisely the right moment to be able to get thru.

 

Yeah you may be right. They have multiple servers with load balancers, depends how they keep their sessions etc. The TTL is also a factor... this value I believe is settable server side and dictates how long before you NEED to refresh. 

I only have the very very very most basic understanding of it all, but an expert (im hoping one of the devs in my work) will have a good understanding and knows the very best way to maximise your chances of a connection.  

[Quark]

I bloody love this forum.  That is all.

[Pinhead]

A few years ago the basic setup that See had was described quite accurately on these pages I believe. Back then it consisted of an IP 'reputation filter' at the door, a load balancer behind that and a somewhat sophisticated session manager behind that which was designed to ensure that once you got in and proceeded through the booking process, you wouldn't suddenly find it timing out at any point (this was after complaints the previous year iirc).

That's probably all changed now though. Back then they ran it on a Virgin Business Cloud platform. Today they probably use AWS or similar, so will use their IP filters and load balancers from their Saas offerings and maybe still their own custom back end. Note that with multiple clients with multiple public IP's, there is a chance that this will introduce a delay as the reputation of each source IP is assessed by the system. If they are recycled public IP's, then that reputation is only as good as their last customer...

[Pinhead]

4 hours ago, eFestivals said:

I'm wondering if it seemingly gives an advantage because people tend to use them as a secondary device for trying or tickets - cos there's a lot of stories that say "I switched to my mobile and got straight thru".

So I'm thinking if people tried on their mobile firstly and then switched to desktop, we'd get people saying "I switched to my desktop and got straight thru"?

Maybe a consequence from something within the See Tickets set-up?

Yeah, quite probably. Else hammering away with your desktop based browser actually reduces your chances of getting in (because See use some sort of traffic flow / DoS filter at the front end), then you try once again your phone for luck and get straight through cos its been comparatively idle. The only thing I could think of where 3/4G might have offered an advantage was that See had some agreement in place with the mobile carriers to bias towards their network for their customers, however this would likely cause a bit of a ruckus if it was ever discovered and there's no logical point in entering into such an arrangement anyway if it can't be publicised in the first place to your customers / competitors.