Hmm?
Clara Moskowitz at LiveScience writes that Scientists discover black holes on the Internet
You’re pounding the keyboard, double-clicking away, sighing and grumbling, but to no avail: That devilish little hourglass icon refuses to give way to the Web site you’re trying to reach. Most Internet users have encountered trouble reaching online destinations, but they often attribute the problem to their wireless network cutting out or a server momentarily going down.
Sometimes, though, the problem is more mysterious. At any given moment, messages throughout the world are lost to cyber black holes, according to new computer science research.
I think that my current problems are related to the TLD [Top Level Domain] DNS [Domain Name Server], essentially the “phonebook” for sites that are in the “.us” domains, but it could be a hidden backbone problem.
One annoying thing about the article is that it doesn’t provide a link to the “Hubble” site, which is an odd omission for Internet technology reporting.
13 comments
article: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36848/113/
Hubble site:
http://hubble.cs.washington.edu/
That’s the link I provided in my complaint. I went out and found it, but they should have included it in their “related links” area, or in the article. Hyperlinks are one of the true advantages ‘Net reporting has over the print media.
FWIW, your site required seven (7) manual tries tonight to look up the domain, the maximum ever from this location (Houston).
The Heretik (http://theheretik.us/) never hesitates during lookup… occasionally during page l0ading, but never during lookup. So it’s not all .us sites.
I attribute it to the ubiquitous use of UNIX servers on the Internet. UNIX has many virtues, but since I first encountered it in about 1990, I have noticed that processes sometimes just “go away” for no apparent reason. It’s better than the Blue Screen of Death, but not by much.
Well, that’s odd, because it has been behaving rather well for me this evening. If it doesn’t work on the first retry, I hit reload, which normally wakes things up.
Now that you mention it, Florida Progressive Coalition is also a .us, so it is just me.
I’m going to have to check to see if there are any other .us at NFS to see if the problem is there.
I just read the article… wow. I had no idea, intellectually at least, that the internet is so much less reliable than the telephone network. In the old days, one could shrug and say it was new, and that much was being attempted for the technology in use. Now, that answer is rather unsatisfying. Thanks for posting this.
Back in the day, the whole concept and the reason it was funded by DARPA was to have a system that routed around problems. That doesn’t seem to be working. These guys are noting the problems that shouldn’t exist.
I noticed on the map that one of the areas of problems is around Orlando, which is where the Sprint/Embarq node is located. I was often detected as coming from a suburb of Orlando by the early mapping programs.
You have a 600 second TTL on your DNS records, that means the downline nameservers will only cache information they obtain for ten minutes and then discard it. This requires a fresh lookup if your site is again accessed, and if your nameservers are a little bit slow in responding that can cause a timeout and resolution failure until the downline nameservers catch up.
Another problem is that J.GTLD.BIZ does not seem to exist but is returned as the first authority record for .US.
The .us is not exactly a popular TLD, which is why it was available, and my name is the Ukrainian word for political thought, so it was a while before I could find anything. I think my original registrar went belly up or was bought out, as a different group contacted me on the renewal.
To avoid using up an IP address, the site is virtual at the end, so there’s an extra delay built in, but it was working fine until a few weeks ago, and then this started. Something changed, but no one seems to know what or where,
“as a different group contacted me on the renewal.” – Bryan
As you probably know, the fact that a domain is up for renewal is public knowledge, and I receive lots of snail-mail which is meant to look like a domain “renewal” but which is really just advertising. I often have to steer clients clear of similar snail-mail. But I’m sure you recognize such fakery.
My domain registrar is one of the ICANN-accredited registrars. They are not cheap, but I am unwilling to forgo one of their features: automated renewal. As long as I keep the same credit card number, the domains are renewed in a timely fashion each year, with the appropriate hit to my card. It worked last year for the YDD’s domain; let’s hope it works again next month. (My business domain is good through 2011; I’m not worried about it yet.)
This was automatic renewal, although I had to change the credit card information. I think the old registrar was bought out. NFS didn’t want to deal with .us, or I would have gone with them. Too bad there’s no .blog TLD.
my name is the Ukrainian word for political thought
that might explain it.
Oh, yes, it took my brother two years to get dumka.com from a Ukrainian discussion group, who I think still uses dumka,org.