#3550 RSS links are inconsistent

[Jon Caldwell]

I am using Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 as a RSS feed reader.

I noticed that most of the time, I would get each story
twice after checking for new stories multiple times a
day. I noticed that each story differed by only the
case of the link. For example, one would be
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?m=2903 and
the other would be
http://rss.slashdot.org/slashdot/slashdot?m=2903. (Note
the difference in the capitalization of "Slashdot").
Thunderbird treats this case sensitively (because some
sites ARE case sensitive about their URLs), and
considers this two separate stories.

To isolate the problem, and know if this was a bug for
Mozilla or you, I took it to the command line. I
executed the following command a few times:

wget -O- http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot |
grep '<link>'

Sure enough, the links would sometimes come back like:
<link>http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?m=2903</link>
and sometimes like:
<link>http://rss.slashdot.org/slashdot/slashdot?m=2903</link>

Based on the way it is behaving, if I were to make a
guess, it is a specific member of the webserver cluster
that is serving up differently. Perhaps a configuration
issue on that specific machine.

If you would like to get ahold of me, do so at
jon.caldwell@cusa.com.

[phirox]

Lately I have a similar issue, but instead of changes in the capitalization the host/port part changes.

e.g. one moment I get this link:

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/En3PmFjoE3c/article.pl

Then it changes on a second retrieval to:

http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/En3PmFjoE3c/article.pl

Note the added default port. This creates similar problems as the original poster states.