Re: [pubsubhubbub] not receiving notifications at callback

[Roman]

Hi Rusty,

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 4:58 PM, rusty <rhamil...@gmail.com> wrote:

As part of a proof-of-concept, we are trying to set up an eat-your-own-dog-food sort of scenario in which we can publish Google Public Alerts to a hub (for testing purposes, we're just using http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/) and then subscribe to and be notified by that hub as well. We had some initial problems getting subscriptions to verify, but we have confirmed that we are indeed subscribed to the hub at this point. The problem is, it appears that we are getting a response of 204 back whenever we publish an alert to said hub, but our callback URL is not being sent any notifications whatsoever.

We have enough logging enabled that we would know if a notification had at least hit the URL at all, and nothing is arriving to us from the hub. We know the callback URL is not an issue, though, because it at least appears that we were able to get our subscription verified. The same callback URL handles subscriptions and notifications.

Fearing we had done something wrong somewhere, we set up an open-source hub (Wolverine, for those interested) and tested our publishing / subscribing code on that. We were able to subscribe to the Wolverine hub, and upon publishing to it, our notification callback URL was hit with a notification. This worked flawlessly, so I know at this point that our code is at least good enough for Wolverine.

What could we possibly be missing at this point?

Here are a few more pointed questions:
1. What in particular would make the PSHS hub refuse to send notifications to a callback URL?

If a subscription is active, the hub will refuse to send updates if there are too many fetch errors from the domain. You aren't hitting the limit, though.

 

Is it possible to find out where our notifications are going? Is it possible to find out if the hub really has accepted our published updates? We have used both the Publisher PHP client library as well as the PSHS publish link, and neither results in any updates being pushed to our callback URL. We know that the hub is able to reach the callback URL with the subscription confirmation request, ruling out firewall issues.

If you could send me topic URL and callback URL (privately if you want), I'll take a look.

2. Some of our subscription details (callback URL omitted for privacy reasons) include:
State:     verified
Confirmation failures:     3
Delivery to domain:     OK
Delivery short-term:     0% errors

What does "confirmation failures: 3" mean?

It means subscription verification has failed 3 times in a row (that's maximum) since the last subscription request was received. Apparently, the subscription had already been verified when the last subscription request was received.

Does delivery to domain mean what I think it means, i.e. the hub at least thinks it is pushing notifications to our callback URL?

It means your are not being throttled. It doesn't mean anything is being sent to your domain.

Roman.

[Isosceles]

I'm curious what was the culprit in rusty's case?  I think I'm experiencing a similar problem. The subscriber is verified successfully.  According to pubsubhubbub.appspot.com - Last verification error: n/a. Last delivery error: n/a.  The very first time the content is published, the entire feed gets posted to a subscriber.  The callback URL gets called and a full feed is delivered.  However, both Subscriber and Publisher debuggers claim that the last item received and last item delivered are a single (most recent) entry in the feed. Is it supposed to publish the whole feed after the initial ping or just a single entry?  Anyways, when the feed is then updated with a newer entry and published, I get a 204 response and the Publisher debugger updates "Last successful fetch" and "Last ping" fields.  But there are no attempts to deliver the content.  According to the logs, subscriber callback URL is never called. What gives?

[Roman]

Here's roughly how the hub functions.

- The hub stores the last version of each feed.

- On publish request, the feed is downloaded.

- The hub removes unchanged entries from the feed it just fetched. Any kind of change in the XML except for comments is considered a change.

- If no entries remain in the feed, nothing else is done.

- Otherwise, the entries are sent to all feed's subscribers.

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 12:08 AM, Isosceles <nataly...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm curious what was the culprit in rusty's case?  I think I'm experiencing a similar problem. The subscriber is verified successfully.  According to pubsubhubbub.appspot.com - Last verification error: n/a. Last delivery error: n/a.  The very first time the content is published, the entire feed gets posted to a subscriber.

That's expected because there is no previous version of the feed in the hub data store, so it treats all entries as new.

 

 The callback URL gets called and a full feed is delivered.  However, both Subscriber and Publisher debuggers claim that the last item received and last item delivered are a single (most recent) entry in the feed.

The debug page always shows a single item even if the last update contained several.

 

Anyways, when the feed is then updated with a newer entry and published, I get a 204 response and the Publisher debugger updates "Last successful fetch" and "Last ping" fields.

Are you sure the feed's content is actually changed before the publish request is issued to the hub?

Roman.