Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

The other day a client called in because for the last five days they were unable to see any listing photos on our site.

I had him send in a screen shot so I could see for myself and sure enough none of the listing photos on our site were appearing. What I figured was wrong was that there was an issue with the CDN (content delivery network) that we use for serving our listing photos. See we serve content from three domains, Redfin.com and two different CDNs. Our listing images are on their own CDN and it appeared that only content from that domain wasn’t been properly served. Since this was the first we’d heard of this issue I had the client run a trace route which confirmed that he wasn’t able to connect to the CDN. Jeff later pointed out that trace route uses a different protocol (it’s not over port 80) so it might not have been the best test but it did point to a problem between the university network that this client was on and our CDN.

I then contacted our network operations team who then emailed the university and asked them if they were blocking our CDN. Turns out they were and two hours later we were unblocked. Upon getting confirmation that the problem was resolved our network engineer called me to let me know so I could follow up with the client. I said thanks and I guess I wasn’t enthusiastic enough in my thanks because he asked rather incredulously if I know what just happened. I said I didn’t. And he replied with that when he used to work at a university it would take weeks for a request to unblock a site to go through and he just got them to unblock us in only two hours. Practically a miracle!

Needless to say the client was happy to be able to see listing photos again as he’s in the middle of making another offer through us.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Redfin Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.