Guru Meditation Error is often faced with HTTP Accelerators, Cloud Computing Softwares etc. What is this error and how it originated? There are many fake and real Spiritual Guru found on the Internet and in real life! But why suddenly your Varnish Cache is throwing Guru Meditation Error 503 Service Unavailable? Funny, no? We talked about Software Bugs, but what this error is named and how to troubleshoot Guru Meditation Error? Guru is a Sanskrit (Language) term for “teacher” or “master”, especially in Indian religions. Usually you will get a HTTP Error Code, may be Error 500 or Error 503. With Guru Meditation Error, like with Varnish HTTP Web Accelerator, we usually face Error 503. 503 means Service Unavailable – simply your configuration is wrong. Guru Meditation Error itself is not enough to tell the story.
Origin of the Phrase Guru Meditation Error
Guru Meditation refers to the screen shown by previous versions of Commodore Amiga, occurred when a serious system error. It is analogous to the Blue Screen of Death often known as “BSOD” in operating systems Microsoft Windows. The Amiga is a family of personal computers sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities.
The term “Guru Meditation Error” is a hoax created by the developers of Amiga. One of the products of the company was the Joyboard – a game controller similar to joystick, but operated by the feet. During the development of the Amiga operating system, developers were frustrated with the constant errors, as a relaxation technique, they developed a funny method in which a person will be sitting with crossed legs on Joy board similarly like a Guru Hindu. The player must stand still. If the player was moving it immediately moved, it caused the error to float again. Thus Guru Meditation Error originated. The classic description of the original hardware and error is :
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The alert appears as a rectangular black box at the top of the screen. The border and the text is red for a regular Guru Meditation, or green / yellow if the error is not critical. The screen goes black and the LEDs on the hard drive activity and power blink immediately before the alert appears.
Solving Guru Meditation Error
In 2000, the HTTP accelerator Varnish adopted Guru Meditation error :
1 2 3 4 5 | Error 503 Service Unavailable Service Unavailable Guru Meditation: XID: 460679933 Varnish |
Other modern softwares who throws Guru Meditation error are related to Virtualization or directly Cloud Computing, including VirtualBox, a Hypervisor environment. In the web game eRepublik, it uses the accelerator Varnish , it has created a movement dedicated to pseudo religious mistake, called ‘The cult guru Varnish’.
One must note the Error code XID number shown with the error and the related software to troubleshoot. For Varnish, for example; we configure /etc/varnish/default.vcl in this way :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | backend default { .host = "127.0.0.1"; .port = "80"; .connect_timeout = 600s; .first_byte_timeout = 600s; .between_bytes_timeout = 600s; } |
But if, Apache is not rightly configured to Listen, Apache2 will not run. Even if you try to soft restart Apache2 after correcting it, it will fail to start. You need to perform a soft reboot.
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