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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

You can see this on a lot of sites right now. You get the Akamai style error with something like:

  Reference: #11.453a2f17.1393u44848484.3aee33433

At the bottom of a very bland looking error page.

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You could argue Akamai is the blandest of the CDN bunch; their UIs are atrocious.

Their APIs are (or, were, last I suffered their use a few years ago) also terrible, eg blanket policy of refusing to cache any resource in the presence of "Vary" header, regardless of its value, and failure to honor standard HTTP headers... thankfully there are many other options for CDN, which are SO MUCH BETTER.

Surely it depends what you vary on?

Content-Encoding should be well supported, User-Agent less so and for very good reasons (there's too much variation in UA strings)

https://learn.akamai.com/en-us/webhelp/adaptive-media-delive...

> AMD automatically strips these headers out of requests to support caching for faster delivery.

> I need the Vary HTTP headers: AMD can cache the associated object if the Vary HTTP header contains only "Accept-Encoding" and "Gzip" is present in the Content-Encoding header

(AMD in this case standing for Akamai Media Delivery)

It wasn't that simple — IIRC, for a while Vary meant “don't cache anything, ever, under any circumstances” unless you made some custom configuration changes. Over time they _added_ support for just “Vary: Accept-Encoding” (IIRC less than a decade ago) and that was fragile. They improved that over time but it was painful for a number of years because there were various failure modes which meant things wouldn't be cached, or (IIRC) compression would be disabled for certain URLs sporadically if the first request for the option did not request transfer compression.

Akamai is their own worst enemy most of the time. Their prices are the highest, they trail on features, their documentation opaque, it takes an hour to propagate changes, etc. Only a few years ago you could only use SSL if you purchased their ridiculously expensive pci-dss plan - I thought they would defend that to their grave.

Better alternatives are Cloudflare, Fastly, AWS CloudFront.

Google Cloud CDN always seems to have very good latency but a very bare bones feature set and no edge compute I can identify. Support is always a huge red mark for Google anything.

yeah, but only tech nerds see it, so it's okay. maybe it's a ploy to get the users to go to the real command set via CLI. make it so shitty nobody wants the UI, and goes back to the terminal. "if you're not a CLI ninja, then you shouldn't be using our product anyways!"

What's frustrating is that DNS is returning an address, instead of just failing, and so macos is caching that value (though it might be cloudflare doing that).

Wildcard DNS should be a prosecutable crime, punishable by no less than 20 years of hard labor. (Edit: Probably should have made it clear that this was a joke)

I don't see how wildcard DNS is related to this? Nor how it's bad?

Wildcard DNS helps me to handle multitenancy easily. What's wrong with it?

When did congress members start posting to HN?

Presumably you're referring to the practice of answering queries for nonexistent records with an A record belonging to an advertisement page? (instead of doing the right thing answering NXDOMAIN, presuming no records of another type also exist for the queried name.)

dnsmasq has a really useful feature for dealing with this: --bogus-nxdomain

To empty the macOS DNS cache:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

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