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Anyone else seeing large numbers of hits to ".static.ess.apple.com/connecticity.txt"?

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  • 1.  Anyone else seeing large numbers of hits to ".static.ess.apple.com/connecticity.txt"?

    Posted Jan 16, 2015 04:22 PM

    This isn't really an Aruba question, I'm just hoping for some thoughts from the knowledgable people who hang out here :)

     

    We're a small 5-12 school, and have found this domain at the top of our "Most visited" domains reports for the last couple of weeks. As far as I can tell, it is only used by idevices checking Internet access by fetching "connectivity.txt". Google is not being helpful.

     

    The bandwidth usage involved is low, but the numbers of connections can sometimes overwhlem our webfilter. We've identified a couple of devices that seem to be the main culprits, but there are still a huge amount of hits to this URL.

     

    Thanks for any insight anyone might have.

     

    Tim



  • 2.  RE: Anyone else seeing large numbers of hits to ".static.ess.apple.com/connecticity.txt"?
    Best Answer

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Jan 16, 2015 06:35 PM

    It is a URL that the captive portal network assistant (CNA) uses to check connectivity https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/538955639116951552

     

     



  • 3.  RE: Anyone else seeing large numbers of hits to ".static.ess.apple.com/connecticity.txt"?

    Posted Jan 20, 2015 08:24 AM

    Thank you for the detail - I knew it was some type of connectivity test.

     

    But my real question is why would I see tens of thousands of connections in a day to this URL from one machine, or several tens of thousands from a half dozen. Just seems extreme, and is causing some problems on our network.

     

    tim



  • 4.  RE: Anyone else seeing large numbers of hits to ".static.ess.apple.com/connecticity.txt"?

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted Jan 20, 2015 09:34 AM
    I want to say that only apple can answer that conclusively. If you have a captive portal network, there are hundreds of devices that could connect to it and perform this test automatically based on the size of your network and how many devices can see it n passing.


  • 5.  RE: Anyone else seeing large numbers of hits to ".static.ess.apple.com/connecticity.txt"?

    Posted Jan 20, 2015 09:40 AM

    understood. I was hoping for some data from non-Apple sources, especially other admins. Again, to be clear, I'm taking about a couple of individual ip addresses sourcing tens of thousands of requests in short amounts of time, not lots of devices hitting the URL. Definitely anomalous behavior for us, showing up in the past couple of weeks.