
HTTP 418: I'm a Teapot - c0restraint
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
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geuis
Somewhat personally funny story.

Some number of years ago I saw a huge traffic spike on
[https://jsonip.com](https://jsonip.com). After investigating, I saw that
someone who seemed to have a misconfigured squid proxy that wasn’t valid IP
data was hitting the api hundreds of times a minute.

The scale of jsonip was a lot smaller back then and still just a personal
project but the requests were significantly crushing the server in addition to
regular traffic.

As a mild joke, I updated the code to return “418 You are a teapot” for the
squid proxy briefly. Just long enough for the user to be “wth” and investigate
so they’d update their configuration. I just targeted the obviously malformed
requests.

Within a day or so the proxy either stopped making requests or got fixed.

I got a laugh out of it and removed that code. Hopefully the person on the
other end also got the joke.

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c0restraint
That’s clever and pretty funny! Thanks for sharing

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halfdan
Ah yes, the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324)

Back in the day I really wanted to build an ethernet ready and HTCPCP
compliant coffee machine. Never got around to it, but in the days of Pi Zero
and similar hardware it's not as of complicated anymore.

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peteforde
Honestly, this has been posted about so many times that the only way this
shouldn't be flagged as a dupe is if you show us photographs of an actual
teapot that implements this response.

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ninjay
Not sure if it's actually serving traffic, but here's a teapot someone put a
Raspberry Pi in: [http://error418.net/](http://error418.net/)

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plapetomain
Always thought it cute that the spec mandates 4 allowable alcohol additions...
but also completely forgot to specify the list of sweeteners.

