International Law

Has anybody missed the Home Office website(s) yet ?

Various Home Office websites seem to be still suffering from serious problems which have effectively taken them offline. since late this afternoon.

Websites affected range from the main Home Office website

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk

and the awful Press website (which never seems to have current Home Office Press releases available)

http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk

through to more obscure ones such as the Independent Monitoring Boards for Prisons website (even though this should really be under the Ministry of Justice)

http://www.imb.gov.uk

Surely their Disaster Recovery Plan should have kicked in by now ?

They do actually have a Disaster Recovery Plan...don't they ?

Either you get a 502 Proxy Error

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid
response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

or you get a Java Apache Tomcat error which mentions the Mediasurface webserver software:

javax.servlet.ServletException: Failed to connect to Mediasurface uk.gov.homeoffice.MediasurfaceXControllerServlet.loadDynamicProps(MediasurfaceXControllerServlet.java:199) uk.gov.homeoffice.MediasurfaceXControllerServlet.init(MediasurfaceXControllerServlet.java:70) javax.servlet.GenericServlet.init(GenericServlet.java:211) org.apache.catalina.authenticator.AuthenticatorBase.invoke(AuthenticatorBase.java:462) org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:118) org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve.invoke(AccessLogValve.java:535) org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:160) org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:799) org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11Protocol.java:705) org.apache.tomcat.util.net.TcpWorkerThread.runIt(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:577) org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:683) java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:534)

Has anybody else missed these vital bits of our "Critical National Infrastructure" yet ?

[UPDATE: the websites appear to be working again this Tuesday morning, without. of course, any explanation or apology or even an acknowledgment that anything could possibly have gone wrong - a bit of humility and humanity from the Home Office would would be appreciated by the public].

Full post as published by Spy Blog on May 19, 2008 (boomark / email).