I woke up this morning and my touchscreen in the kitchen, which I had just mounted this weekend, was showing the following error message:
# Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
### Guru Mediation:
Details: cache-bos4676-BOS 1623147623 1366110870
Varnish cache server
I checked one of the is it up web sites and they were reporting that sharptools.io is not responding so I don’t think this is a local issue for me.
Assuming this is beyond my control I was wondering if anyone knew how to have Fully Kiosk throw up a banner screen or redirect to another site in the event that this happens? Thanks.
Thanks for the update. Your theory was correct - looks like Fastly, one of the largest content delivery networks (CDNs) had a global outage. It was impacting a large number of sites including CNN, New York Times, BBC, and more.
Out of curiosity, did either of you load the web app fresh or have an auto refresh setting in Fully Kiosk Browser? Fastly serves some our ‘static’ content, so if the web app was already up and loaded, then the rest of the app should have continued to function as normal.
Not knowing what the issue was I tried several things - “Goto Start URL”, restarting fully kiosk, etc. I eventually loaded chrome to confirm web was ok and then realized it was something to do with Sharptools specifically. It wasn’t until later that I saw the post above about Fastly and connected the dots.
Which was what led to my first question - I don’t see a way for Fully to put up a image or other local html file in the event of a failure on the primary site?
If I remember correctly, Fully Kiosk has a ‘Custom Error URL’ setting under Web Content Settings that seems like it will do what you want - either load an alternative URL or a file when there’s an error loading a page. I haven’t personally tried it, so if you give it a try, be sure to let us know how it works!
I did attempt on two different FKB solutions on Fire HD 8+s. One was calling an error about Varnish caching errors, the other was calling sharptools.io DNS errors from Fastly. Oddly pretty much the same setup with different errors. I had other professional problems with Fastly, so was an easy call to make on the cause of the outage.
As with all things Fully - there are so many options that it sometimes gets a little confusing. After further investigation I find
I had Auto Reload on idle and Auto reload after page error set to zero - inactive. This was not intentional. Unlike other options that have a slider on/off - these items require selecting and specifying something other than 0 - so I had inadvertently left them off.
I will set these moving forward and also setup a local web page to display in the event of an error. Of course testing the redirect web page may take some time if there is not another outtage.
Why do you want the auto reload features enabled? In general, we recommend keeping the various autoreload features turned off as it is less efficient to do a full reload.
In the case of the Fastly issue noted above, if the SharpTools.io app was already loaded in the browser (and no refresh / auto reload was performed), then you wouldn’t have noticed any outage as the dynamic parts of application were fine (it was just the CDN for the initial load).
After further investigation I actually didn’t have these options turned on. What hosed me was that I turn on the screensaver to a blank screen at night and then when I turn off the screensaver in the morning i have the option to performed an auto-load on screensaver off. So this caused it to reload the page.