A couple clients (not all) noticed last week they weren’t able to view their web site online. Standards based browsers would just keep trying and trying to find the site, but there would be no error message, while IE showed the page could not be found message shortly after entering the address.
To make matters worse their e-mails wouldn’t work either. Their e-mail clients said they couldn’t find the server. Resetting everything did nothing.
Since, at first, it was just one client, and the problems couldn’t be repeated, we thought it had to be something on the clients end. A corrupted host file (a file in windows that tells Windows were to find the numerical addresses of web sites that correspond with each domain name (ie; look for texxsmith.com at http://62.95.226.01). Unable to diagnose the problem, I called the big guns and got them on the problem. But then it got weird.
The client couldn’t view the web site on neighbors machines. Then I couldn’t view the web site from my computer. No longer could I enter the web sites control panel. At this point now, I’m thinking that it’s a problem with the clients domain name since this client managed his own domain name, I was thinking perhaps some one accidentally changed the setting that tells the internet (A DNS server specifically) exactly were to look for the files that make up a web site.
And then another client called with the same problem. I did some more research and noticed that some web sites on other servers in this part of the country were having the same problems. But what was the problem?
Then just as mysteriously, the problems solved themselves. All web sites and e-mails started working again all on their own. Now what could cause all that? Well the headline to this story is kinda giveaway. There are big fat servers all over the country that do nothing but hold list of domain names and the corresponding numerical address where web-browsers and other internet software should look when some one tries to view a web page or connect to a sever, get e-mail, send e-mail etc. (anything involving a domain just about). One of these servers, the one that serves the Southeast united States evidently, had a partial shutdown and partially stopped functioning.
Then my “big guns” got back to me. Yes the big guns are slow, but that’s because they’re doing big research! They said that the DNS server numbered blah.blah.blah had been malfunctioning effecting thousands of websites (but less than 1% of the domain names it served records for). They also said they alerted Internic (the international organization in charge of distributing the internet domain names), but that Internic was already aware of the problem and was replacing the machine.
Problem solved. The funny part is that if we all would have known what the problem was we could have just sat back and let Internic take care of it. Live and learn right?
Does this happen often?
No. I’ve been designing web sites since 1995 and I’ve never seen anything like this nor have any of the other web designers on the few forums that I give/receive advice from have ever experienced such a thing. A few said (after the fact) that sure they had heard of that, of course they didn’t say anything while I was looking for a solution and trying to diagnose the problem. There’s always a few in every bunch like that isn’t there?
