The boring life of Jerod Poore, Crazymeds' Chief Citizen Medical Expert.

Weirdest. Domain Name Problem. Ever.

Or maybe not. I think it's pretty whiskey tango foxtrot.

The first thing the domain host tech support people want to eliminate is any ID-ten-T at the keyboard problem, with emphasis on eliminate, as they can reach the site using http://crazymeds.us. I've done enough tech support myself to go along with them. Cleared the cookies, browser & DNS caches, browser history, zapped all of the temporary files (which I do on a regular basis anyway), tried multiple browsers, etc.

Nope. Just as I wrote in the trouble ticket. I could reach the site only via the IP address, some people could reach http://crazymeds.us but not http://www.crazymeds.us, some people had no problem with either.

From home when I ran a traceroute to crazymeds.us it told me crazymeds.us didn't exist. A traceroute to the IP address ended at the domain host, where the IP address resolved to a generic host name for the domain host (vps.domainhostname.com). An nslookup of the IP address returned the same generic name.

From domaintools.com a traceroute attempted to go to crazymeds.us, but timed out at the specific server that's one machine upstream from Crazy Meds at the domain host. I tried nslookup of the IP address at different places and got different results, either crazymeds.us or the generic domain host name.

From domaintools.com I could ping crazymeds.us I didn't think to ping from home.

Even weirder: from the bash shell on the server itself the damn thing didn't recognize its own name.

# traceroute crazymeds.us
traceroute: unknown host crazymeds.us

# nslookup xxx.xx.xx.xxx
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

After a few hours I was able to access the site again via the name. I wrote to tech support to let them know. Whatever it was, it fixed itself. That sort of thing happens. Here's the weirdest part of all, about an hour after I wrote them I get an e-mail back to me because they couldn't get to it! How often does that happen?

Weird shit like that happening to any site, even Google or Yahoo, for five or ten minutes, sure. All the time. But for over three hours? Maybe longer because I didn't try anything until 2:00 pm.

I'd love to know what caused it. The tech support guy thinks it had to do with the firewall. Unless I accidently changed something, which is entirely possible, I don't block any access to the DNS port.

In the meantime I'm working on improving the response time and I'm still trying to get the e-mail notifications of PMs, new posts, etc. working. I'm not getting much in the way of an error message when IPB has issues with e-mail. It tells me there's an error. Gee, thanks. Plex likes to scatter error logs all over the place, but I'm not having much luck in finding any details as to why the e-mail isn't happening.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for all your work on the site and the forum.

Hope that all is resolved soon. This is some truly weird shit. Not unheard of but weird. Try to get some rest for yourself. No good can come from frying your brain. Take it easy.

Unknown said...

Now that I've had time to look at what tech support did, I didn't make any changes to the firewall entries for DNS . He added entries giving explicit access to the IP address upstream where DNS traffic originates and goes to.