I am programmatically trying to download some RSS feeds hosted on Akamai. I have seen discrepancies in feeds pulled from a server in Europe vs USA (and perhaps various regions in US too).
Is there a way to programmatically, from one single machine/location, check multiple Akamai locations spread across USA to discover any discrepancies? I am using Java and/or python for this - in case of any libraries that can help with this.
It would only be possible if you had a list of IP addresses of Akamai's Points-of-Presence where you'd like to monitor discrepancies. Akamai would not, reasonably, publish this information, but you can do some sort of intelligence tricks, for example match IP addresses from here:
http://bgp.he.net/search?search[search]=akamai&commit=Search
against maxmind geoIP database, and then try request the content you need via IP addresses selected in such cross-matching pre-processing. So you can have a hundred IP addresses for a chosen location, but ounly few of them corresponds to a service map Akamai uses for your specific RSS acceleration, so you have to try all hundred to find out.
Specific RSS is identified inside Akamai by FQDN. So to probe the IPs you do this:
curl -H "Host: FQDN" http(s)://IP/uri
If this returns HTTP 200 OK, you have your RSS content for this specific area.