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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Wayback machine and VMware KB links

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/22

The VMware KB is notoriously bad into being saved in the WayBack Machine: saved links hardly render at all because of the VMware KB dynamic page loading structure.

But VMware KB articles expire, so a lot of web-pages point to non-existing links and end up through redirections at [Archive.is] https://kb.vmware.com/s/pagenotfound.

Below are a few link forms of the same VMware KB 2011818 article that vanished from the regular web. The first is saved in the WayBack Machine (but does not render), the second is saved and does render after a redirect to a saved third form, the most recent saved fourth form is actually a 404-error redirecting to a prior third form.

  1. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2011818
  2. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2011818
  3. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2011818
  4. http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2011818

The first link form does archive as a rendered page in Archive.is if is is archived. t wasn’t, so the current archived version points to the “pagenotfound” page mentioned above.

Sometimes you have to dig deeper, as not all rendering archived versions contain actual content.

Here the first one is not even archived, the other ones are, but none of them have actual usable content:

  1. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2007922
  2. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2007922
  3. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922
  4. http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922

This means you have to dig further in history:

  1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140123114343/http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922 indicates not authorized
  2. https://web.archive.org/web/20130117041323/http://kb.vmware.com:80/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007922 shows the actual content.

–jeroen

This entry was posted on 2022/03/22 at 18:00 and is filed under Internet, InternetArchive, link rot, Power User, WayBack machine, WWW - the World Wide Web of information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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