Fly client problem: invalid authority

Questions / Help
,
1

I haven’t made any recent changes to my app and out of nowhere I see a bunch of log entries as follows:

proxy lhr [error][PU01] client problem: invalid authority

Note that my machine is in Toronto (YYZ) and the error is generated in LHR (Europe). Any idea what may be causing this? I’m not sure where to begin troubleshooting.

Here is my dockerfile (pretty much default built)

# syntax = docker/dockerfile:1

# Adjust NODE_VERSION as desired
ARG NODE_VERSION=20.11.0
FROM node:${NODE_VERSION}-slim as base

LABEL fly_launch_runtime="Node.js"

# Node.js app lives here
WORKDIR /app

# Set production environment
ENV NODE_ENV="production"


# Throw-away build stage to reduce size of final image
FROM base as build

# Install packages needed to build node modules
RUN apt-get update -qq && \
    apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y build-essential node-gyp pkg-config python-is-python3

# Install node modules
COPY --link package-lock.json package.json ./
RUN npm ci

# Copy application code
COPY --link . .


# Final stage for app image
FROM base

# Copy built application
COPY --from=build /app /app

# Start the server by default, this can be overwritten at runtime
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node", "./bin/www"]
3

Just to stimulate ideas, are you losing any traffic? Is this app on the public internet?

4

Nope, I have not noticed any performance degradation to my app. I thought this was an internal Fly issue; I just ignored it thinking it would go away after some time. This error gets logged about once every day or two for the past 2 months

This app serves as an API to my website. You can make a sample request by visiting api.ride42.ca. A sample public query would be api.ride42.ca/presenttrackdays

1 Like
5

This is caused by a misbehaving client. As an example, I’ve seen this when the client issues an HTTP/2 request without setting the HTTP/2 :authority pseudo-header or setting an authority that’s not known/served by the IP address it’s connecting to.

These can be safely ignored; or, if some of your customers report errors that correlate with the timestamp of those log entries, you can get more details on their client and why it might be sending invalid requests. (hint: a modern well-known browser will never result in this kind of error).

  • Daniel
6

Thanks for the help Daniel. Good to hear it’s a client issue; nothing to fix on my end then I suppose. I’m curious what client is making these malformed request since my API sees extremely low traffic (maybe 3-5 requests in a week). I see these errors come up more frequently then that. Could it be some sort of web crawler?

7

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