web site

dugan at passwall.com dugan at passwall.com
Mon Oct 14 22:43:07 PDT 2002


On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 10:10:04PM -0700, Lorie Obal wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Sue Bennett wrote:
> 
> > On Tuesday 08 October 2002 22:50, dugan at passwall.com wrote:
> > > On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 10:15:45PM -0700, Sue Bennett wrote:
> > > > I'd like to be able to get to the nblug web site.
> > > > I keep getting server time out errors.
> > >
>  You are probably right in that 
> > it appears it might be a problem between Sonic and CDS.
> > I had a friend who also uses CDS try it and it was a no go for
> > him as well.
> > 
> 
> Interesting...I use CDS and I have not had trouble accessing the nblug web 
> site.  However, after reading your postings, I tried and it was a no go.  
> sorry I don't have a date for my last access - must have been over three 
> weeks ago.

There are a few likely problems:
1) DNS issues:
 a) No DNS reponse for this lookup
 b) DNSlookup reports incorrect IP address

2) Filtering:
 a) ISP is filtering traffic to prevent access
 b) routing tables are screwed up

You can test both of group 1. I know of an "open DNS" and can
communicate infor about it to you in private. As an alternate, you can
try the following:
1) Modify your OS's DNS Addresses (copy them to paper before they are
changed) and modify them to only include
208.201.242.2
208.201.224.33

NOTE: when you do this, it is very likely that you wont be able to have
DNS lookup work for sites NOT served by sonic.net. However, this will
allow you to test DNS resolution of your ISP's DNS.

If the above change does work, then change back the DNS entries on your
OS to what they were originally.

If you have dig or nslookup installed in linux-land, then once your DNS
have been returned back to the originalk state, you can use nslookup or
dig to try a lookup of www.nblug.org. If your ISP's DNS says the
host.domain does not exit, then your ISP DNS:
 1) has bad information (was not able to resolve the lookup due to a
drop of network connectivity in the past, and the cached failed lookup
is persisting in its cache.
  *or*
 2) is not properly resolving the DNS lookup as a result of some poor
configuration.
 (Other possible problems too, but above 2 most common.)

Once you have diagnosed this, if you determine it to be a DNS issue from
your ISP's DNS, then contact them. They may need to restart their DNS,
force the cache to timeout, or any number of other things.

If the DNS check proves to not help, then I can offer suggestions on
systems to test filtering rules imposed by your ISP...
1) Use a proxy server. There are some that are supposed to be free.
Google has a page of "free proxies" and some may actually work ;-)

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Proxies/Free/

Assuming your ISP has not filtered these proxies out as well, it is a
way to check filtering to nblug *AFTER* you have determined that DNS
problems are not at issue.

Hope this helps. If any of you can provide feedback to help resolve the
issue, that would be grand.

-ME

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