Clogged Tubes
I’m beginning to suspect that the telcos are engaged in a bit of filtering of DSL. Beginning two days ago I’ve had a miserable time getting to this site, with a lot of time outs and not founds along the way. When I go to the hosting service and run the diagnostics everything is wonderful, and I have no problem at all reaching the hosting service, which indicates it is not a routing problem in general, but specific to my site.
Then I noticed the same types of problems with Bark Bark Woof Woof, the Yellow Doggerel Democrat, Sideshow, and a few others. I already know that this site is blocked by a lot of filters because there is an avid gamer who uses the nom de jeu of “Whynow” and is on gaming sites all over. The other sites get blocked for various SBC sphincter-control problems that result in astroturffing. I’m trying to get some information on what’s going on, but there is a major problem reaching “customer service”: Internet failure hits two continents
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.
India’s Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.
It so wonderful that I can’t reach a technician for my local phone company because some Egyptian fisherman dragged an anchor. So, how’s that outsourcing working for you?
10 comments
Info: still clogged as of 1651 Thursday. It took me three tries to get here just now.
I thought something strange was happening, and wondered if someone was playing silly-buggers with your site. I get a lot of timeouts and no connects also.
We had a problem some years ago with our brand new undersea cable that our wonderful (LMAO) Telstra lay on the ocean floor where it should have been safe and snug. Except a section floated to the surface and got sliced by a fishing trawler! Typical.
Cutting corners to increase profits just works so well doesn’t it?
cat power must be working in my favor, because i’ve had very few problems connecting to your site, and none at all connecting to bark bark woof woof or the yellow doggerelist.
offshoring though is a sore point, including the fact that my ‘real’ email is having problems [again] and the tech support people don’t live anywhere near here.
FWIW, Bryan, it must be close to home on your end, because I have no trouble seeing any of the other sites you named… only yours. Sometimes it takes me two or three tries to get your site to load.
I suppose now that DHS will have to initiate a program to detect and prevent terrorism by evil fishing boat anchors…
More info I forgot to post: the delay and failure are apparently in looking up the domain.
Thanks all. It’s definitely a DNS problem, so I wonder if it’s with the .us registry and not my ISP.
And just in time for us to gripe about it, it started working again :-). I just sat in a loop doing host lookups at both of your DNS servers and had nary a failure. I then telnet’ed to port 80 of all three of the hosts reported by your DNS server and found that each was a fully functioning Squid server. If the problem was that the Squid server could not look up the data on your actual server, we’d get a Squid error, not a DNS error. So it looks like something got fixed somewhere… and yes, I had the same problem connecting to your site earlier today.
That’s one reason I’m glad I’m on Blogspot now (and have my DNS divided between two different ISP’s), Google is pretty good at that “run a big massive webfarm” thingy :-).
Still problematical Friday just after midnight…
Aside to Badtux: I have the same web host as Bryan, and it’s not happening to my site as far as I can tell.
It has to be the .us server, because I can get here though the direct link behind the .us alias. It is getting better, which probably indicates they have discovered they have a problem and are fixing it.
I had no trouble getting to you this morning (Friday 2/1/08 @ 8:23 am ET) but I’ve been having trouble getting to Shakesville from my office for two days now. All other sites load fine, it’s just that one, and only from this computer. (Shh.) It loads fine and fast at home over Bellsouth DSL. Curioser and curioser.