Author Topic: Farnall (UK) down again (Read 14573 times)

orbiter · « **on:** January 16, 2011, 12:39:34 pm »

I, like many of you guys get a lot of my stuff from Farnells, however have you noticed how much down time their website seems to have?

It seems as though whenever I need to get something, their site doesn't work

Today is no different, except that this time it's not for maintenance, It's down altogether, not a sausage. In fact a big fat..'PAGE CANNOT BE DISPLAYED' is showing up. So the first thing I normally do is head over to the cpc.co.uk website just to see if they have what I want. However there's a probelm there too.. In that I think CPC is run by Farnell's so that site is down as well

And it's not just me.. I've checked... Handy site to keep in your favs too guys... http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

C'mon Farnell. With a business the size of your's the website should NOT be down so much!

Boloop · « **Reply #1 on:** January 16, 2011, 01:12:11 pm »

He he, I think they have messed up their server setup or something.

Ok, farnell.com and uk.farnell.com resolve to the same IP. That has port 80 open. All looks good so far. Okay. We use netcat to talk to the sevrer.

"GET / HTTP/1.0" <-- The server will close the connection. Which will explain why google chrome says "Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): Unknown error."

However if you use the header "GET / 1.0/HTTP" it works. It works on incorrect headers, but not the right one. Lol.

Code: [Select]

one@C:~$ nc uk.farnell.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0

one@C:~$ nc uk.farnell.com 80
GET / 1.0/HTTP

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Connection: close
Pragma: no-cache

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
... More HTML crap

orbiter · « **Reply #2 on:** January 16, 2011, 03:09:55 pm »

no problem shafri

Farnell's is up again now, I'll give it week

Zad · « **Reply #3 on:** January 16, 2011, 03:57:39 pm »

Farnell is back up, but Element14 is now down... I guess they are doing upgrades / maintenance, but someone there really should learn how to put up a static apology page to inform people what is happening.

Element14 asked me to tell them what I thought was wrong with their site, that's just another 2 items for the list...

orbiter · « **Reply #4 on:** January 16, 2011, 04:11:07 pm »

Agreed Zad.. Makes you wonder whether anybody actually reads those feedback forms.

baljemmett · « **Reply #5 on:** January 16, 2011, 04:49:29 pm »

Quote from: Boloop on January 16, 2011, 01:12:11 pm

"GET / HTTP/1.0" <-- The server will close the connection. Which will explain why google chrome says "Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): Unknown error."

However if you use the header "GET / 1.0/HTTP" it works. It works on incorrect headers, but not the right one. Lol.

They might be rejecting HTTP/1.0 because it's a bit long in the tooth and makes life difficult -- for a start, it doesn't support the Host: header so it has no idea which site you want to talk to. Ought to at least send a reply though instead of dropping the connection...

From memory an invalid version specification like the second one is supposed to be treated like an HTTP/0.9 request (as with any request that doesn't specify a version), though, so even in that case it shouldn't be responding with an HTTP/1.1 response! Perhaps it was trying to return a 'bad request' page but without actually sending the relevant status code; unfortunately far too many people do daft things like that, including people who really should know better (hello, NXDOMAIN hijackers!)

Anyway, protocol pedantry aside, it usually seems to be Saturday night or Sunday morning for me when Farnell's sites are down. I guess that means it's planned fiddling rather than catastrophe, but usually they put a 'down for tinkering' page up in that case. Odd.

Simon · « **Reply #6 on:** January 16, 2011, 07:36:05 pm »

farnell do seem to be a bit backward in maintaining their website. I still get product suggestions for a discontinued out of stock capacitor just because i bought a few when they were on offer, I mean cmon after the hundreds of parts I've bought there must be more suggestions they can offer

Bored@Work · « **Reply #7 on:** January 16, 2011, 09:36:21 pm »

Farnell is extremely backward in my country. Like other distributors who got stuck in the past they refuse to sell to anyone but businesses. This stems from the times when we had a significant electronics manufacturing industry, stuff was on allocation for years, and they could dictate who gets and doesn't get components. These days there is no such thing as a significant electronics manufacturing industry here. But they still live in the old times and think they call the shots.

I always laugh my arse off when some of these big fat distributors starts an "initiative" to lure more customers in their arms, do the social networking thing, embrace the hobbyist and inventor, and then their local branch tells the want-to-be customers to fuck off. Arrow, RS, Farnell, and many smaller local distributors in my country all only sell to businesses. So from my point of view they can fuck off with their element14, ArrowUnplugged or DesignSpark bullshit.

They have really clueless and pervert marketing muppets, probably sitting on their big fat arses in the USA, coming up with these initiatives to win over customers, while in reality they only burn money.

Simon · « **Reply #8 on:** January 16, 2011, 09:57:14 pm »

Quote from: BoredAtWork on January 16, 2011, 09:36:21 pm

They have really clueless and pervert marketing muppets, probably sitting on their big fat arses in the USA, coming up with these initiatives to win over customers, while in reality they only burn money.

management are always up their asses and out of touch, it's like where I work, they think that subbing everything out works out cheaper. We just setup a section to assemble stuff for a new customer: so they split a current department into 2 and put the new area in between the two, why not leave the whole department at the same end of the area as they already were and clear the rest up and put the new area in the already unused space - management ! assholes

Zad · « **Reply #9 on:** January 17, 2011, 12:27:12 am »

All down again by the way, but they have at last got around to displaying a static apology page.

After a comment I made on Twitter, Element14 asked me what I didn't like about the site. I said I'd write a considered opinion down and email it to them. Sunday was
probably not a good day for me to do that... Anyway, it won't be ranty, but it will point out things like their being at least 25 items on the front screen, Google has 7. Rhetorical questions will be asked, such as; Why do we need to know who this week's most popular posters are? And; Why, when you are updating the web site, is nobody capable of putting up a static apology page for several hours?

I know for certain they don't have fat execs sat on their arses in the US. Because Premier Farnell is based 15 minutes from me in the glamorous* canalside environs of Leeds, England. However, the CEO does get £1.29M a year, and the COO and CFO get £791k. Very nice. That pays for a lot of fat arse sitting.

It is unlikely much will change at Farnell in the near future, their share value went from 180p last january, to 280 this, and their profits were up by more than 50% this year, so the Stock Exchange loves them. Normally, non-trade people are pointed at www.cpc.co.uk (also down). Sadly, trade still earns a heck of a lot more than individual sales and I suspect always will do, even in these post-industrial times.

* May not actually be glamorous. At all. Check Google Earth.

Simon · « **Reply #10 on:** January 17, 2011, 07:57:50 am »

hm the prices of SMD resistors are not bad on CPC, cheaper than farnell themselves, I don't quite see the point of having another website selling mostly the same stuff but never mind, farnell will sell to the general public on a minimum order od £20 which is reasonable as they pay the postage

orbiter · « **Reply #11 on:** February 21, 2011, 09:25:11 pm »

Down again tonight! Always when I want something too

Chasm · « **Reply #12 on:** February 21, 2011, 10:14:09 pm »

Quote from: Simon on January 17, 2011, 07:57:50 am

[...]
farnell will sell to the general public on a minimum order od £20 which is reasonable as they pay the postage

All over the world maybe, in Germany they sell only to registered businesses and students.
Free shipping above 75 euro.

Annoying.

johnboxall · « **Reply #13 on:** February 21, 2011, 11:54:50 pm »

Glad I live in Australia (for many reasons), as element14 sell to anyone with a credit card, and ship overnight for free, minimum order Au$10. Then we have RS, who match the offers.

Chasm · « **Reply #14 on:** February 22, 2011, 01:42:14 am »

Don't get me started on RS.
They only sell to registered businesses. Even after pretty please.

Then there are also occasionally some funny price differences. It would almost be feasible to pay someone somewhere else in the EU to resell me the parts. (Well, if that person would work for almost free.

)

Quote from: tronixstuff on February 21, 2011, 11:54:50 pm

Glad I live in Australia (for many reasons), as element14 sell to anyone with a credit card, and ship overnight for free, minimum order Au$10. Then we have RS, who match the offers.

Bored@Work · « **Reply #15 on:** February 22, 2011, 07:12:44 am »

Quote from: Chasm on February 22, 2011, 01:42:14 am

Don't get me started on RS.
They only sell to registered businesses. Even after pretty please.

I certainly won't get you started on RS. Not to long ago I had a discussion with an RS guy about DesignSpark. He wanted to "sell" it to me on the fact that it is free, can produce a BOM for RS, and because it is free I can have a legal copy at home, too.

He suddenly hadn't much to say any more when I asked him about the fact that in the eye of RS at the end of each work day I turn from an employee they want to sell to, to an individual customer they don't want to sell to. So much for that great DesignSpark copy at home.

A few days later he came back and promised to "fix" my problem with RS. It sounded he wanted to try to sneak me in under some made-up, fake business account, as a favor, you know. I told him I don't need to get a fix, it is RS that should be fixed. I can buy elsewhere. I told him RS has an arrogance and attitude problem. But so do Farnell, Arrow and the like. They can all go to hell with their your money isn't good enough attitude.

Simon · « **Reply #16 on:** February 22, 2011, 07:43:08 am »

it is true that they are all the same and RS is the less functional and has the worse website with less stock, I just go farnell although I've learnt to hate them too.

joelby · « **Reply #17 on:** October 18, 2011, 03:43:32 am »

Just thought I'd put in a plug for element14 (Australia). I had a call from them a few days ago and I mentioned that I'd consider placing my next large order though one of the US sites if it worked out to be cheaper, and they encouraged me to submit a BOM for a quote with my target price. Using Findchips to examine each line, I found that element14 Asia Pacific and Newark had far cheaper prices than the Australian branch, and interestingly, Digikey or Avnet were rarely cheaper than element14.

The quote was a bit of a surprise - they even reduced the prices on line items that were already the cheapest I could find, or were for Multicomp passives that aren't sold elsewhere and were already pretty cheap, and in total the quote came to $230 less than retail.

So, definitely consider asking for a quote - especially if it's for a larger order.

Simon · « **Reply #18 on:** October 18, 2011, 05:59:24 am »

there is a similar situation in the UK, digikey which is reputed to be cheap has horrendous prices over here. As you have discovered they can certainly afford to bend for people to get their custom, pity other retailers in the UK who are ripping us off don't do the same.

david77 · « **Reply #19 on:** October 18, 2011, 08:22:07 am »

If I absolutely have to I will order stuff at RS or Farnell, but only as a last resort.
I prefer RS, but just because they have no minimum order and offer free shipping regardless of what you order. As far as I'm aware no one else offers this service in Germany and they reliably deliver the next working day.
I have to say though, RS have managed to ruin their already less than good website recently, but I have seen that same problem at other suppliers websites this year, must be a new trend.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk to a Farnell salesman in person. I told him what I think of Element14, their shoddy search features and the stupid paper catalogue. I think he was a bit down when he left

.

Personally I too avoid Digikey like the plague. Their prices are horrible, their shipping times are horrible and the customs invoice that invariably follows 2-5 weeks later makes my eyes water.

Simon · « **Reply #20 on:** October 18, 2011, 09:38:12 am »

in the UK RS charge £5 per delivery, for this i tend to go to farnell as although i need to make a minimum order of £20 i pay no delivery and that is quite a saving. There have been occasions where i made large orders at RS and the prices were lower than farnell so I more than recovered the carriage costs but this is no longer the case and farnell in the UK tend to be cheaper for my needs as well as having more stock. digi key have a vast but expensive range that I won't touch

ally · « **Reply #21 on:** October 18, 2011, 09:40:38 am »

I saw this thread before and asked them to answer when I worked there..but don't look like anyone has. When I talked to the people responsible there, they said there were some legal difficulties for Farnell to sell to private individuals in some countries, primarily Central and Northern Europe. I'm not too sure of the exact details

Simon · « **Reply #22 on:** October 18, 2011, 09:47:37 am »

well in the Uk they sell to private individuals although care little for this line of business, i know that when i lived in Italy you needed to be a business to buy from RS

ally · « **Reply #23 on:** October 18, 2011, 10:09:04 am »

Quote from: Simon on October 18, 2011, 09:47:37 am

well in the Uk they sell to private individuals although care little for this line of business, i know that when i lived in Italy you needed to be a business to buy from RS

I'm sure Farnell and RS have the same legal problems in some countries. So it may be wider than North and Central Europe. I was told that they would love to be able to sell to individuals. There are ways around it as someone described earlier.

joelby · « **Reply #24 on:** October 18, 2011, 11:41:12 am »

Sometimes companies operate as wholesalers and have agreements with their customers not to sell directly to retail. Just register a business name and open a cash account!

It probably doesn't hurt to ask any business if they'll consider price matching competitors. At worst they'll say no, or give you a funny look if you try this at McDonalds.

I talked to the element14 rep again this afternoon and asked about minimum quantities for quotes. She said that there wasn't really a minimum so I was always welcome to ask. I'd feel a bit silly about doing this for very small orders, though. As an example, some passive was around 1c each and after the quote it was reduced to 0.001c. I asked for a hundred, which made the line only ten cents (!!). I hate to think how much it would cost for someone to look at the order, find the box in the warehouse, count to a hundred, cut the tape, seal it in a bag, print and attach a label, and then overnight courier it to another state.


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Author Topic: Farnall (UK) down again (Read 14573 times)

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