One of those mornings

I set out this morning to solve a simple problem. Find a SoHo router/firewall for a small non-profit. I'm really a Cisco guy, so the Cisco SoHo product line seems like a good place to start.



Doh! Turns out the whole Cisco web site generated those really cool error messages for a while this am. It came back though. Sort of.

 

Not only does their home page point to a dead link, their 404 page is 404'ing. Is that a double Doh?

I figure that a major technical snafu by a major technology corporation is worth blogging about, not because I think it's a big deal that Cisco borked up their web site, but rather so that sysadmins, DBAs and developers who have a tiny fraction of Cisco resources can take solace in knowing that they aren't the only ones who occasionally bork up a perfectly good system. Even having effectively unlimited resources doesn't guarantee perfection.

Now that I use OS X at home and I can't use the way too awesome Windows Live Writer for blog posts. Too bad.  I figure I'll go back to using the Blogger editor.



Damn. Maybe it's something I'm doing? Try Safari. No difference. Try a bunch of other web sites. They all work. So Cisco and Google are broke.

I'm curious, so I try looking at the HTML source for the broken web pages. Firefox doesn't show anything interesting, but in both cases Safari shows slightly different behavior, so maybe viewing source in Safari will amuse me. No idea how to do that, other than it's Ctrl-Option-Shift-Splat-something, so I Google it. Of course the first link I pick partially loads, then re-directs me to [munblesomething].ru, a site which advises me that I need Java in order to load their web page.

Those Russian web site operators sure are helpful. I'd have completely forgotten to install Java on my shiny new 11" Air had they not reminded me.