I already emailed TubaDiva about this, but if anyone else can help, I’d sure be grateful.
I can’t get to the boards from home (I’m at work now). When I click on my SDMB bookmarks or click the “Message Boards” link at the top of straightdope.com, I can see the browser trying to pull up the page, but it’s not able to. It’s just like what happens when the server crashes.
I have two computers at home, an iBook and an eMachines desktop. On the iBook, I have Safari and Firefox and on the eMachines, I have Internet Explorer and Firefox. All four browsers are having this problem.
I started a thread on the Fathom boards asking for help and someone suggested that maybe my IP had been blocked accidentally.
Like I said, I already emailed TubaDiva, but I don’t know if she’s “working” today or not, so I thought I’d see if any other mods or admins could help me. Thanks.
If your IP was blocked, you would get a screen that says something like “sorry! You are not allowed to access this page”. What you are describing sounds like a problem with your ISP or some network connection along the way. Or do you have any content blocks on your computer, so some sites are resticted?
What message do you actually get? If you get the “Sorry! You aren’t allowed” message mentioned by Gaudere, you are probably IP blocked at the SDMB server. If you get an “Operation timed out” or similar message, then there is probably a block or glitch somewhere between the SDMB server and your computer.
So you are able to get to straightdope.com from all 4 browsers at home, but not the boards?
I don’t think I have any content blocks, but like I said, it’s happening on two computers. The message I’m getting (on IE, anyway) is the “This Page Cannot Be Displayed” one. On Firefox, the operation times out and on Safari, it just keeps trying and trying.
Well, it’s working again. I don’t know what happened, but it’s nice to have my Dope back. I was planning to call Cox (my ISP) when I got home from work last night, but we’d had a bad storm and the power was out. It didn’t come on until about an hour and a half ago. When I logged on, the first thing I did was come here and—what do you know?—it’s working.
DNS - Domain Name Service. It’s the protocol and network infrastructure that convert the url like boards.straightdope.com to an IP address. Your computer needs that address in order to retrieve pages from the board.
Sometimes, glitches occur. With DNS, they will often straighten out over time.
Computers don’t actually use names like “straightdope” between themselves. The names the computers use are numbers called IP addresses, like 207.97.195.229 (the address for boards.straightdope.com). When you type in a name like boards.straightdope.com, or follow a link to that address, your computer contacts another computer called a Domain Name Server (DNS), to ask it if it knows the numerical address for the computer with that name. If the DNS knows, it’ll return that to your computer, and your computer can proceed to use that address to send information to and receive information from boards.straightdope.com. If the DNS doesn’t know, it’ll ask some other DNS higher up the line, which knows more addresses, and so on. In principle, this should always eventually get you to some server which knows where things are and point you in the right direction, but in practice, glitches happen from time to time. So what happened here is most likely that the DNS your home ISP uses got confused, but the DNS at work didn’t.
Okay, now I’ve got another question: If, when I was having the problem, and if the problem really was a DNS issue, would typing 207.97.195.229 into my browser’s address bar have gotten me to the boards?
Beg to differ. Just tried it and got redirected to the Boards main page. This works, as does typing “boards.straightdope.com” (without tacking “/sdmb” on the end), too.
D’oh! :smack: Just realized the question was about trying this during a DNS problem.
I think the answer is still that it would work, because the initial connection to the IP address would succeed, the local DNS cache should then cache the address when receiving the (redirection) response, and subsequently you’d have the name resolved in local cache.
But I could well be wrong about this. These are the moments I wish we had editing to hide our idiocy… :smack: :smack: :smack:
Temporarily switching proxies can sometimes get you through. My own server suddenly forgot where TV Tome was; I resolved the matter by switching to one of my cable isp’s other proxies, which was having no problems.
You’re still right. If the problem was a DNS issue, then connecting via IP address would work fine. Hyper-links might not work if they are absolute instead of relative, but you could always manually type an address in replacing “boards.straightdope.com” with the IP address. You can also work-around the issue by adding a hard-coded entry to your hosts file.
You sure about that? I mean, if a domain name and/or IP address is for some reason missing from the registry (usually because a change to it hasn’t propogated throughout the network yet), then how can a browser request packets from it?
A quick way to test this (ie whether one there’s a DNS problem)* is to try to access the problem website via its IP address instead of its name.*
…216.239.51.100 is google.com’s IP address, so now enter http://216.239.51.100/ into your web browser’s address or location box. If the website comes up, you’ve got a DNS problem.
IP does not rely to DNS to be able send packets. The internet would work fine without DNS, you’d just have to reference everything by ip address http://10.2.2.2/apage.html or whatever. Kind of like the telephone system, you’d have to look up the number of the site you want to contact.
You may be thinking of IP route changes being propagated between routers. This is possible cause of failure but a different problem than DNS failures.
There are public DNS servers you could change to if your ISP’s are giving you problems.
Finally, even if you use IP addresses to get to a site, it still might not work if there are absolute references to other content in that site. So if my home page has a link to www.citybadger.net/page2 it will fail if accessed by IP address. I should have coded it with a relative path /page2 instead, but stuff happends, and I might never notice.