Browser continues to redirect after website changes (solved)

[wynn]

On Thursday last my bank has a problem with online banking and set up a redirection on their site from the login page to
a "Sorry" page.

Since then, although the bank has returned login to normal, the browsers on this machine all go to the redirected page.

Cache and history are set to be cleared when the browsers exit: I have tried uninstalling the browsers (Firefox and SeaMonkey), deleting the entry in .cache and deleting .mozilla and reinstalling them without changing their behaviour; I have installed other browsers (Chromium (4hrs!!) and Vivaldi) and they do the same thing. Even w3m, a text mode browser does it.

I tried to login on my laptop while the page was up and browsers on that are still showing the "Sorry" page.

The only machine which doesn't wasn't ever used to login to the site when the page was up.

Here is the emerge --info for this machine:

[eccerr0r]

Well, something is still cached...

Were all the machines rebooted (to clear DNS cache?)

Does your router cache something?
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[Hu]

If a browser you never used before has the problem, then the problem is not on your system. HTTP caching is done in the individual client, not on the system as a whole. They probably have the bad page up somewhere and tried to redirect people away from the redirect, but failed at it. I would monitor network traffic when fetching the page to verify that your system talks to theirs. Use curl or wget to fetch their page. Those have no automatic cache, so if they hit a bad redirect, then that says the peer is still emitting bad redirects. My guess is that they have a load balancing scheme that relies on multiple co-equal Internet-accessible servers, that one of those servers still emits the bad redirect, and that when they tried to stop sending the redirect, they only updated some, but not all of the servers. It probably works just barely well enough that they think it is correct.

[krinn]

cookie can do that too (combine with badly coded homepage)
- first log -> cookie set with "last visit="/accounting"
- next visit -> redirection base on cookie result, so trying to jump to /accounting", while your bank as change it to "/account"
that's why even your bank said, we have fix it, as long as you don't clear your cookie, their stupid homepage will load the cookie and try redirect to death to /accounting, and as /accounting no more exists, you'll get redirect to "sorry page".
it's so ugly, because if they change /accounting to /account, they should had also drop the cookie name to force using a new one, if cookie is name "lvisit" just handling a new cookie name would had fix that "l_visit", as your computer will have an "lvisit" cookie, but not yet a "l_visit".

and guess it: cookies are not clear by cache and history clear.

[wynn]

Thank you all for your replies.

@krinn: I tried turning cookies off in Firefox but it didn't cure the problem

@Hu: I think your suggestion is probably the right one as the problem has disappeared after my telephone call to the bank yesterday.

@eccerr0r: ...or, as you suggest, the router. I don't know anything about its innards but I switched it off and on again because it had gone into a sulk and wasn't talking to anyone...

Thanks again -- it's nice to know that there's somewhere to turn to with an intractable problem..
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