Test Network and Servers

Note: This documentation is for an old version of Webinator. The latest documentaion is here.

Test Network and Servers

This area provides the ability to test the network connectivity of Webinator and find what web and file server documents look like to it. It is divided into two sections. The first section is for testing Webinator fetching and processing of urls. The second section is for testing Webinator's general network connectivity.

Test URL fetch

First choose the profile whose settings you want to use for the fetch test or choose -Defaults- for all default settings. If you are currently working in a profile that profile will be automatically pre-selected.

Checkboxes are provided for most of the profile URL settings so you can test those without typing them in. Check as many of those URLs as you want to test.

The input Other URL is also provided so you can test any arbitrary URL. Multiple URLs may be entered separated by space. Be sure to properly encode any entered URL. In particular encode space as %20.

Several processing options are provided to control how much processing to do.

Full Processing Perform full processing on the fetched file as if it is being prepared for the search database. Otherwise only perform the basic download of the page.
Check Robots.txt Consult the site's robots.txt file to see if the selected URL is acceptable to fetch by the crawler. The test will fetch the URL regardless of robots.txt settings since it's a single page test not a full crawl.
Keep Download Keep the raw undecoded download and decoded data for display. Using this can make the test results page particularly large for large source documents like PDFs etc.

Press Test Page Fetch(es) to begin the testing of the selected URLs.

Each selected URL will be fetched in sequence and results of the fetch(es) presented one after the other on the same page. A short summary will be shown for each fetched URL followed by various statistics and other information about the page. Most of the information is collapsed (hidden) to reduce page clutter. Click the + next to an item to expand that item for viewing. Click the - to recollapse an item. Use the Collapse all and Expand all links to Collapse all items or expand all items respectively. Use Show empty fields to show all fields even if there was no data for them. That helps one determine that a value is actually missing as opposed to overlooked for display.

Large text fields will be shown in scrollable areas by default to avoid taking over the page. Click the + next to a scrolling area to let it fully expand onto the page. Click the - to reconfine and expanded field.

Test Network

There are several network tests available. As many as desired may be done together. Each will be executed in sequence one after the other and the results presented together on one page.

Find IP Lookup an IP address for a given host. Options (correspond to walk DNS Mode settings):
- Internal - Perform the lookup using internal parallelizing routines.
- System - Perform the lookup using standard system routines.
Ping Send ping packets to the given hostname or IP address to determine reachability and speed. Check Gateway to ping the configured gateway address. A handful of packets will be sent and statistics about each and a summary of response times and loss will be displayed. Note that not all machines respond to ping and some firewalls block ping. Page fetching may still work even if ping doesn't.
Traceroute Trace the network route to the given hostname or IP address to determine reachability and spot possible problem areas. It will display one line for each hop along the network route to the target machine. Asterisks (*) indicate a problem finding the next hop. Note that some firewalls and routers block traceroute. Page fetching may still work even if traceroute doesn't.
Email Send a small test email to the given email address. This will test Webinator's email configuration as well as the recipient's ability to receive emails from Webinator. If the recipient doesn't get the test email look in Maintenance->Manage Logs->maillog to see if the message was handed off successfully. If it was handed off check the recipient's spam folder.