fanf2/bulletin-a

Error 404 when asking for more than 6 previous issues of Bulletin A

Closed this issue · 3 comments

Something seems to have changed about the availability of archival bulletins. While the example in the README shows successful retrievals of 50 previous issues of Bulletin A, when I use any argument over 6, I get an error:

$ cargo run 7
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.01s
     Running `target/debug/bulletin-a 7`
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-011.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-011.txt

Caused by:
    [22] HTTP response code said error (The requested URL returned error: 404)

Here I show just the fetches and errors from a number of runs. If there is no Error, then it ran fine.

Note that the code knows how to find Bulletin A based on the (I'm not kidding) roman numerals for the number of years since their initial epoch for this sort of archival (1987). But they seem to be failing to serve more than 6 weeks back (https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-011.txt from 2022-03-17 and before)

fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-017.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxiv-050.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxiv-050.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxiv-020.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxiv-020.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-016.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-001.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-001.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-002.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-002.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-015.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-014.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-008.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-008.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-013.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-011.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-011.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-012.txt
fetching https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-011.txt
Error: failed to get https://datacenter.iers.org/data/6/bulletina-xxxv-011.txt

I don't know if this is a glitch in archival, or a change that the code needs to be aware of, but I figured I'd at least document it for others, as we track the most interesting period in earth rotation in decades, and the possibility of a negative leap second.

After some googling, I also ran across this, which also just lists the last 6 issues:

BULLETIN A - all available versions

Note that a random sprinkling of them have been saved from a few crawls by the Internet Archive over the last year:

Wayback Machine search for archived Bulletin A

fanf2 commented

Yes, there was a problem with datacenter.iers.org a few weeks ago (it was completely down for a while) and when it came back most of the archive was missing. Vexing!

Since I don't know where else to get old editions from other than my own copies, I've committed them to this repository, so you will only need to fetch new issues that I have not yet synced.

fanf2 commented

PS. my archive goes back to 2005 which I think (if I remember correctly, which I might not) was all that was available when I fetched them.

Wow that was fast - thanks!!

And this is all just shortly after maia.usno.navy.mil came back online, as announced in Bulletin A itself as of 10 February 2022: https://github.com/fanf2/bulletin-a/blob/main/bula/2022/006

Hopefully we can dig out some other old ones.....