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Answered

No Data message

Madhur Behl 10 years ago updated by Christian Fritz 10 years ago 9
I know there is another thread discussing the same problem but I have tried clearing the cache as suggested. 
The problem is that when I run Bibbase on the .bib file, I keep getting the 'No Data' message. 
Am I missing something obvious ?
The URL to my BibTeX file is http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~mbehl/pubs/pubs.bib

Answer

Answer
Searching answer
When bibbase tries to receive that bib file, it received the following message instead:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>419 unused</title>
</head><body>
<h1>unused</h1>
<p>The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request.</p>
<p>Please contact the server administrator,
webmaster@seas.upenn.edu and inform them of the time the error occurred,
and anything you might have done that may have
caused the error.</p>
<p>More information about this error may be available
in the server error log.</p>
</body></html>

I can't quite tell you why at this point. I can manually retrieve your bib file using curl or wget just fine. But it isn't an error that I've ever seen before, so I do suspect that the message is true and that there might be something misconfigured with your web-server. Your admin should check the logs.

Sorry for displaying a more descriptive error message in this case. It just doesn't happen more than once in a blue moon.

-- Christian



Answer
Searching answer
When bibbase tries to receive that bib file, it received the following message instead:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>419 unused</title>
</head><body>
<h1>unused</h1>
<p>The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request.</p>
<p>Please contact the server administrator,
webmaster@seas.upenn.edu and inform them of the time the error occurred,
and anything you might have done that may have
caused the error.</p>
<p>More information about this error may be available
in the server error log.</p>
</body></html>

I can't quite tell you why at this point. I can manually retrieve your bib file using curl or wget just fine. But it isn't an error that I've ever seen before, so I do suspect that the message is true and that there might be something misconfigured with your web-server. Your admin should check the logs.

Sorry for displaying a more descriptive error message in this case. It just doesn't happen more than once in a blue moon.

-- Christian



Christian,

Thank you for the prompt reply. 
I will run this by the web admin at my end.
OK. Let me know what you find. I've also just pushed a small update that makes sure you get a proper error message now in the case you are encountering.

Christian, the web services at my university are taking a closer look at the server error logs. 
Meanwhile, can you shed some light on what Bibbase does to fetch the file ? 
As you correctly pointed out, the bibtex file is retrievable via wget. 
BibBase isn't doing anything special. It just retrieves the file via an HTTP GET request issued from node.js using the regular HTTP module (http://nodejs.org/api/http.html#http_http_get_opti... The only header that is added is "If-Modified-Since" with the date of the last retrieval. This allows your server to respond with "304 Not Modified", which saves bandwidth and time to render your page as BibBase can then use its cache.
Hi Madhur,

I've dug a whole bunch deeper using tcpdump. I noticed that unlike wget and curl, bibbase was not sending a User-Agent header. It's a little picky of your server to deny requests without that header, but that's OK. BibBase is now sending this header as well and now your web server seems happy. This now works: http://bibbase.org/show?bib=http://www.seas.upenn....

Perfect! Thank you so much Christian.
I want to say that I really think Bibbase is the best utility for listing one's publications online.
I will recommend it to all my colleagues.