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Servers of several websites down?

Started by 23 Daves, August 25, 2012, 05:45:57 PM

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23 Daves

I haven't been able to access either the last.fm website or myspace.com all day, and my wife has been having trouble getting on certain news sites.  We're getting the standard message of "can't find the server".

Just trying to ascertain what's going on here, whether I have some kind of household malfunction or virus, or there's just widespread website failure going on all over the place.  I can't seem to get any verification from anywhere else that there's actually a problem.


BlodwynPig

LastFM was working a few hours ago but not now.

chocky909


Uncle TechTip

All sites fine here, suspect a problem at your ISP. Unlikely to be a virus, what would they gain out of it? Reboot your modem & router.

Consignia

I'm getting it as well. When I do an nslookup, I'm not getting any IP addresses back, which suggests a DNS issue. Try switching your DNS to openDNS. There should be decent instructions on the site. I'm surprised I'm not using it to be honest.

alcoholic messiah

If you can access

http://216.178.47.11/

but not

http://www.myspace.com/

then it's almost certainly a DNS problem.

If you're confident enough to modify your router's settings, I can heartily recommend changing the DNS servers you use to Google's: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

23 Daves

Quote from: alcoholic messiah on August 25, 2012, 06:19:04 PM
If you can access

http://216.178.47.11/

but not

http://www.myspace.com/

then it's almost certainly a DNS problem.

If you're confident enough to modify your router's settings, I can heartily recommend changing the DNS servers you use to Google's: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Well, I'm getting a very mangled view of the website through the former address, but nothing via the latter.

Why would the DNS settings have flipped on all three computers in the house overnight, though?  That's most baffling. 

Consignia

It's not your computer's DNS settings, it's your ISP's[nb]I bet it's BT, they are shit.[/nb]. Their DNS server isn't resolving names properly. You don't have to use the ISPs, it's just what you get by default. I seriously recommend switching them to openDNS.

alcoholic messiah

What Consignia said. It's unlikely to be a problem caused by you wrongly configuring / accidentally changing something.

Your router will be configured with two DNS addresses, which are likely to be the (remotely located) DNS servers provided by your ISP. It would appear that they're not performing their designated task at the moment.

After dumping my ISP's DNS service, I initially switched to OpenDNS, but, for reasons I can't currently recall (acted flaky one too many times?), I got fucked off with them a couple of years back, and switched to Google's service. I haven't felt the need to drop them since.

23 Daves

Quote from: Consignia on August 25, 2012, 06:41:49 PM
It's not your computer's DNS settings, it's your ISP's[nb]I bet it's BT, they are shit.[/nb]. Their DNS server isn't resolving names properly. You don't have to use the ISPs, it's just what you get by default. I seriously recommend switching them to openDNS.

You're right, it is BT.  A stern word may be in order (they cold-called us this week to try and get us to shift to Infinity, we refused on the basis that we don't want to get locked in to an 18 month contract with a company which has so far been utterly inept. Incidents like this one just make that decision seem even wiser).

Just switched to openDNS and that seems to have resolved everything!  Thanks - I've never had this problem before, so it's not something I ever needed to give a second's consideration to. 

Consignia

Yeah, it is awful, you shouldn't have to consider things like that. The company I used to work for used BT Business, and it frequently had this problem. Made worse by the fact the company was a remote office and was reliant for business on it working. I took it on myself to get everyone sorted with openDNS, because BT tech support were useless in the matter.

23 Daves

Quote from: Consignia on August 25, 2012, 07:41:59 PM
Yeah, it is awful, you shouldn't have to consider things like that. The company I used to work for used BT Business, and it frequently had this problem. Made worse by the fact the company was a remote office and was reliant for business on it working. I took it on myself to get everyone sorted with openDNS, because BT tech support were useless in the matter.

The last company I worked for used BT Business, and the entire office was without the Internet and email for a whole week!  Admittedly the problem was that some cabling had split, but it turned out to be their fault for not laying it properly in the first place. 

BlodwynPig


23 Daves

Nope, I'm using openDNS now as we speak, and things since this morning have been much the way they were yesterday - last.fm is refusing to load along with a quantity of other websites, and even Cookdandbombd is being painfully, painfully slow (freezing for ages after the "CaB Radio" section loads so I can't see the rest of the page content for about a minute).

Really infuriating - I've disabled DNS through Mac Terminal, then re-enabled it - no difference.  Reset the browser, no difference. Emptied the cache, that didn't work. Changed to Google DNS, just as bad. Flushed the DNS settings, that didn't work.

I'm guessing this is a router problem and I'm going to have to get on the line to BT's "helpline", something I really, really don't want to have to do, since previous experience has taught me that you have to ring them four times to get the required result. 

DAZZA DIRTBOLLOCK

I don't know if things have been resolved for you yet, but from here it looks like it could be something to do with this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/28/cut_underseas_cable_cripples_networks/