Juno

Today it was #juno's turn to devastate the North East of America. Whilst luckily there was no devastation in NYC, the decision was made that the office would be closed until the trains returned to service. This didn't mean much to the Engineering team, we'd all decided yesterday that regardless of the weather we'd just work remotely.

While the blizzard raged, we coded up a storm.

We're now at a point where we can start testing the integration of our interexchange/campminder-rb gem with our Application. We're using vcr/vcr to record and subsequently stub our requests to a remote service, regardless of future test runs, the first will need to have a successful response from CampMinder's servers.

This took us back to the issue of all our requests having the originate from the same IP addressk, a restriction of CampMinder's API and hurdle we knew we'd have to overcome. We'd already decided to get with Proximo, and so we begun implementing a proxy call into our Net::HTTP calls.

As you can see above, by the end of today we were bashing our head against 403 authorization issues being returned by, what we eventually discovered to be, the Proximo servers. It was good to know that we weren't alone in having issues using Proximo with Ruby http libraries. It appears that the proxy: username is causing an issue in the protocol detection.

To multiply the issues further it turns out Proximo DOES NOT SUPPORT HTTPS, rendering this service entirely useless to us. We're likely going to have to roll our own Squid Proxy Server, thankfully I went to a highschool that blocked access to websites, so this won't be the first time I've run my own proxy.

Fun fact, did you know that we ran out of IPv4 addresses years ago now? Seems like we're fighting an uphill battle against a restriction that belongs to another age. Thankfully we should be done soon, but we'll definetely need a better long term solution.