BBC Website problems causing difficulties to get_iplayer

[Simon Ritchie]

The BBC website still appears to be in difficulties.  If I go to the
schedule for Radio 4 and follow one of the links to a programme, I
wait a long time and then I get an error message.  It's a little
different from the one I got yesterday, but it's the same underlying
problem: "Error 500 - Internal Error.  This might be because: We are
experiencing abnormal traffic to our network or the service or servers
it is on is not currently available."

The effect on get_iplayer is pretty much the same as yesterday - the
Web PVR Manager gives me a list of available programmes with some
entries, but most are missing.  In my case,  The list doesn't contain
any of the programmes I've set to download, so my PVR Scheduler runs
but doesn't do anything.

I guess it could be caused by a major Denial of Service attack, or it
could just be that the BB has had a serious equipment failure and
don't have a spare.  Some equipment is difficult to buy over the
weekend.  Anyhow, given the cuts, they probably don't have as many
experienced support engineers as they used to, and some of them will
be on their summer hols.  (I used to do this stuff for a living,
holding mission-critical computer networks together with spit and
string, so I know what it's like.)

Oh well, maybe they will fix it tomorrow.

Simon