I couldn’t get on for an hour, and there seems to be a big posting gap.
I noticed that there’s a big post gap in MPSIMS from this morning (about 6am to 10.30am GMT). The boards have been crawling all day for me (on a very fast office network connection), and I’ve been getting “HTTP 500 internal server error” messages at home from about 5pm until now (7pm).
The main page is unavailable to me for some wierd reason. Needed to be linked to a thread to get in.
I couldn’t access the board or the home page for about 20 minutes - kept getting that “Page Not Found” message, but I wasn’t sure if it was down or if the site had been blocked here at work. Since I’m here now, I guess it was the former.
The straightdope.com router died today about noon. Fortunately we had a spare in reserve and were able to swap the old router out and put a new router in. Things should now be back to normal…in other words…slow.
On a related note, while bending over to work on the router my trusty Palm Pilot was overcome with sudden remorse at the failure of the router and in distress tragically flung itself from my pocket only to die ungloriously on the floor right in front of my eyes. Quelle dommage! lol
Ta for the info.
Now all I have to do is get “She’s got jdavis eyes” out of my head.
Let me revise my previous post on why the boards have been down…and up and down and up and etc…
It’s not our routers, it’s our ISP, UUnet, who apparently is having systemwide trouble in the Chicagoland area. While the circuit is remaining up data is only flowing through it occasionally. Being that this is a systemwide problem we don’t really have much control over the resolution or are we receiving individual support. So, our fate is left in the hands of UUnet for the time being.
I’ll check back in a few times over the weekend and see if things haven’t stabilized. It’s quite possible the straighdope.com web servers will be available and then unavailable in cycles throughout the weekend. That is what we’ve been seeing throughout the day.
Jerry
Thanks for the info: I’d been trying to get on at work and I couldn’t figure out if the IT idiots had actually blocked the site (they’re going on a rampage), or if it was my computer (the IT department installed some horrific anti-virus software) or if the problem was on your end. I can relax this weekend!
Thanks!
Fenris
As I posted over on Fathom at 1:34 EST today:
Jerry, you gotta call on some of us on the outside once in a while! < snicker > Once I saw the bouncing of IP addresses then the “time to live” issue something told me it was an ISP issue.
I’m not a full time professional IT person anymore but still gots a few tricks up my sleeve.
I have a DSL line with GTE and normally my route gets on UUNET here in Dallas and goes straight to Chicago. A little while ago it went to Washington DC then to Raleigh, NC and ended up in some business there. It definately wasn’t the Chicago Reader.
Jim
jdavis, thank you for the info. You and the rest of the tech staff do a great job.
I couldn’t access the boards for a while either. For the rest of the amateur web nerds like me, here’s part of what Neotrace came up with at 3:08 PM Central time today, during the access problems. At node 11 it starts looking wonky.
-#----------Node Name---------------IP Address------Location--------
3 seri3-0-1.chi-e100.gw.epoch.net 206.135.4.57 Unknown
4 155.229.70.17 Unknown
5 pos5-1.dcp-c000.gw.epoch.net 155.229.57.173 Unknown
6 pos0-2.atl-c000.gw.epoch.net 155.229.57.138 Unknown
7 pos1-0-0.dal-m100.gw.epoch.net 155.229.123.130 Unknown
8 144.atm1-0.br3.dfw9.alter.net 137.39.93.9 32.783N, 96.800W
9 177.at-5-0-0.xr2.dfw9.alter.net 152.63.100.174 32.783N, 96.800W
10 0.so-3-0-0.tr2.dfw9.alter.net 152.63.10.81 32.783N, 96.800W
11 128.at-7-3-0.tr2.dca8.alter.net 146.188.141.149 38.908N, 77.017W
12 0.so-2-0-0.xr2.dca8.alter.net 152.63.35.250 38.908N, 77.017W
13 188.at-2-0-0.hr2.dca8.alter.net 152.63.39.1 38.908N, 77.017W
14 103.atm12-0-0.dr1.rdu1.alter.net 152.63.32.133 35.767N, 78.625W
15 tnt1.manassas.va.da.uu.net 206.115.154.204 Unknown
16 smtp.wlrva.org 63.97.40.129 Unknown
17 boards.straightdope.com 63.97.40.4 Unknown
Jerry, are you saying your Palm Pilot died in vain?
Bummer.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Nah, not quite in vain, Tuba. A blood sacrifice is always helpful.
Here here.
And you never seem to get much credit for it either. Hope their paying you well.
Or, well enough to get a new palm pilot.
I hereby move that J.Davis’ router explanation go up at the top of the forums as an Announcement.