e503 no service

Pound is a popular load balancer / SSL terminator. As it usually happens with open source programs, there is plenty of documentation and self-help available on the internet, but there's one error message I could not find. Pound denied access to the web site and logged the following message:

pound: (756000001700) e503 no service "GET / HTTP/1.1" from 12.34.56.78 www.thedomain.com

I've found out that access to a service has been blocked by a HeadDeny directive. The specific problem was denying requests containing the X-Forwarded-For header - which blocked access by users behind proxies. Changing HeadDeny in service to a HeadRemove in listener fixed the problem.

Speed your HikaShop with Varnish

HikaShop is an e-commerce solution for Joomla. They have a pretty usable free edition, and reasonably priced commercial editions with support.
We worked together with the Hikari team to make our Varnish-Joomla integration work with all editions of their extension. The result of this work is available in version 1.3.1 of our package, which was out in November 2013.
No matter if your shop receives thousands or millions of view every day, your prospective clients deserve fast page loads. Visitors who don't have anything in their cart will enjoy viewing pages from cache, and more server processing power will remain for these who actually need it (visitors with items in their carts, visitors doing checkouts, your staff). Everybody wins.