Life In 19x19
http://www.lifein19x19.com/

Site access problem
http://www.lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=10138		 Page 1 of 2
Author:  John Fairbairn [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 11:14 am ]
Post subject:  Site access problem
For many days now I have had inordinate problems getting access to L19 on different machines, operating systems and browsers.

As far as I can establish, the problem is with looking up the site on the DNS server. Almost as confirmation of this, if I go to google and call up the site from the search results I can on straightaway. I'm assuming google doesn't use DNS names but stores the web site number (I don't what they are really called but they look something like 22.5.98.45).

So my main question is: how do I get hold of this number myself (and can I store it in Favourites)?

Subsidiary questions are: what the dickens is going on, and is anyone else having this problem?

Incidentally, even when I do get in things seem to settle but it can be flaky. I've already lost one post (which I'll never bother to try to repeat) because the system went walkabout when I pressed Submit. This has happened often enough before that I know I have to save long posts periodically as I compose them, but it still seems a bit antediluvian in internet terms to have to do that. Is there a better remedy?

A further question, possibly a quite separate topic but I have no way of knowing: there are times when my preference to stay logged on (i.e. not having to re-enter a password) is ignored, and repeatedly. In the past this has cleared itself, but it has just started again.

What I find odd about it is that it will come up on one machine, say the Windows one, with a message asking me to sign in, but I ignore it as and I can't be bothered to faff around. A little later, I might try again on a different machine, say Mac, and I go straight in! Or vice versa - it's not a Windows/Mac issue, I think.
Author:  Splatted [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 11:30 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
I've been having no problems with the site recently and I do visit regularly.

As for the logging in thing, that happens to me periodically on various sites and seems to come and go without reason. Perhaps it's some kind of internet forum seasonal disaffective disorder.
Author:  RBerenguel [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 11:35 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
As I wrote in another thread, I've had several (>3 per day, for the last 7-8 days) cases of "server not found" issues with my iPad Air (I browse the forum far more often from Mobile Safari than from my laptop, so I can't rule out problems in it). From what John has been digging and my own personal evidence, maybe *it* is a DNS problem: I have Google's DNS in my laptop, but my ISPs on my iPad (I have just fixed this, though, as a double check).
Author:  daal [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 11:40 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
I've also been experiencing delays recently.
Author:  Uberdude [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 1:04 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
Me too. Seems like DNS problems indeed.

@John: That number is called the IP address* and you can find it out by opening a command window/terminal and typing "ping lifein19x19.com" then enter. That will send a ping message out to the server and report the reply time, and at the top give the IP address:

Code:
Pinging lifein19x19.com [50.62.100.1] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 50.62.100.1: bytes=32 time=190ms TTL=51
Reply from 50.62.100.1: bytes=32 time=182ms TTL=51
Reply from 50.62.100.1: bytes=32 time=203ms TTL=51
Reply from 50.62.100.1: bytes=32 time=182ms TTL=51


I tried to access the forum with the IP address rather than host name by putting

50.62.100.1/forum/index.php

in my address bar but I got a strange "pageok" response from the server, not sure what's up there yet.

* version 4, and we are running out of them. There is a new version 6 which looks like 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334 .
Author:  Bantari [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 1:22 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
I have had trouble as well. Sometimes it was just slow, sometimes it was DNS error. Pretty much every day in the past week or so. Had to try multiple times before the site loads, and then often the pages load really slow.
Author:  Mike Novack [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 2:50 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
John Fairbairn wrote:

Subsidiary questions are: what the dickens is going on, and is anyone else having this problem?


We wouldn't be having the same problem at the same time because it is extremely unlikely that the DNS's on the network where you connect to the internet are the same ones on the network by which we connect to the internet.

I'd check with your provider. They might have alternate name servers you could specify rather than the ones that are busiest << "not found" if the name entered was correct usually means that the DNS was busy and didn't respond before the request for translation from http to ip timed out. You don't get a different error message for these two rather different situations, at least I don't >>
Author:  RBerenguel [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 3:13 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
Mike Novack wrote:
John Fairbairn wrote:

Subsidiary questions are: what the dickens is going on, and is anyone else having this problem?


We wouldn't be having the same problem at the same time because it is extremely unlikely that the DNS's on the network where you connect to the internet are the same ones on the network by which we connect to the internet.

I'd check with your provider. They might have alternate name servers you could specify rather than the ones that are busiest << "not found" if the name entered was correct usually means that the DNS was busy and didn't respond before the request for translation from http to ip timed out. You don't get a different error message for these two rather different situations, at least I don't >>


John is in the UK. I'm in Spain. I don't know where Bantari and Uberdude are, but we probably are not using the same DNSs. Maybe there's a misconfiguration in the domain provider for L19, with a bad time to live in its own nameservers?
Author:  ez4u [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 3:18 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
I have experienced this 'server not found' problem from Japan as well.
Author:  Joaz Banbeck [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 3:35 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
RBerenguel wrote:

John is in the UK. I'm in Spain. I don't know where Bantari and Uberdude are...


Uberdude is in the UK too, I think.
Bantari is Southern California, USA. So am I.

I'm on at least once a day, sometimes ten times a day if the spammers are persistent. I've had no problems for months.
Author:  Bonobo [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 4:18 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
Joaz Banbeck wrote:
RBerenguel wrote:

John is in the UK. I'm in Spain. [..]


Uberdude is in the UK too, I think.
Bantari is Southern California, USA. So am I.

I'm on at least once a day, sometimes ten times a day if the spammers are persistent. I've had no problems for months.

I’m in Germany, and I guess sometimes I’m on about 16 hrs/day :mrgreen: i.e. I have the tab “unread posts” open ALL THE TIME, and sometimes I reload several times per hour, sometimes every ten minutes if I don’t have anything better to do.

And in case you’re wondering, I have EIGHT such tabs, all pinned, that I all reload with one click (using the Tabs Reloader plugin for Chrome which allows me to reload only pinned tabs, so my dozens of other tabs stay “old” :-D ).

While some time ago I had LOTS of disconnections, I haven’t had them with L19 in the past two or three weeks. But I noticed that today I couldn’t reach Wikipedia for some time …

Greetz, Tom
Author:  tchan001 [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 4:50 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
Happens to me too. Doesn't feel so bad when you are just reading L19 but when you are trying to reply to a thread and it doesn't connect when you submit, that's really annoying.
Author:  Bantari [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 5:00 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
RBerenguel wrote:
Mike Novack wrote:
John Fairbairn wrote:

Subsidiary questions are: what the dickens is going on, and is anyone else having this problem?


We wouldn't be having the same problem at the same time because it is extremely unlikely that the DNS's on the network where you connect to the internet are the same ones on the network by which we connect to the internet.

I'd check with your provider. They might have alternate name servers you could specify rather than the ones that are busiest << "not found" if the name entered was correct usually means that the DNS was busy and didn't respond before the request for translation from http to ip timed out. You don't get a different error message for these two rather different situations, at least I don't >>


John is in the UK. I'm in Spain. I don't know where Bantari and Uberdude are, but we probably are not using the same DNSs. Maybe there's a misconfiguration in the domain provider for L19, with a bad time to live in its own nameservers?

San Diego, California, US.
Was about to say the same thing.
Author:  oca [ Thu Apr 10, 2014 10:42 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
Hello,
Same for me, I experience some kind of DNS problem from switzerland.
It's seems to happend more from my iphone...
Author:  kusto [ Fri Apr 11, 2014 12:21 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
I had the same problem recently.
You can fix it by adding this line to your hosts file on whatever device you are accessing the website from.
Code:
50.62.100.1 lifein19x19.com


Example Instructions: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/27350/be ... osts-file/

Also, if your i-devices are jail-broken then you can do the same. This would be done by accessing /etc/hosts with a program like iFile for example.

This is kind of a band-aid solution but I hope it helps someone none the less.
Author:  oca [ Fri Apr 11, 2014 12:26 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
On my iphone, it *seeems* that the problem occurs more ofen with chrome then with safari...
Author:  jug [ Fri Apr 11, 2014 2:07 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
I have also connection problems (from Germany) since a few days. I open this forum with a direct link to the unread-posts, but it always leads to a page-not-found (also on repeated reloads).
Strangely though is, when I then enter then over the main-page and doing the 2-3 clicks to go from there to the unread-posts it works (auto-login enabled BTW).

Need to observe it more for common patterns (like the aforementioned DNS), so far this feels like a balancer put me on a non-functioning cluster-node, but I guess L19 does not use balancing/clustering, no?
So far this is a tad inconvenient (and a bit annoying).

Have something changed in the architecture / software / infrastructure ?
Author:  HermanHiddema [ Fri Apr 11, 2014 2:09 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
I've not had any problems at all.


As to the technology behind it:

The number (50.62.100.1) associated with a domain name is called the IP address. Due to the scarcity of IP addresses (only some 4 billion), there are not enough addresses for all domain names. Therefore, many domains share the same IP address with other domains, and your web browser must tell the web server which of those domains it wants to access. That means that, unless lifein19x19.com has a unique IP address and the web server is configured to serve only that site, approaching L19 by IP address will not work. Uberdude's experience shows that it is indeed not possible.

That also means that google can not, and does not, link to the IP address directly. Therefore the site should not be more available, or faster, when linking via google search results.

To improve the response time for looking up the IP address, you can use kusto's solution. Note, however, that should lifein19x19 ever change IP address, that that solution will mean you cannot reach lifein19x19 at all any more until you remove the entry from your hosts file again.
Author:  Jordus [ Fri Apr 11, 2014 4:20 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
The issue is definitely DNS related. Our current setup does not have a dedicated IP. Also it is not accessible by IP alone. More than likely the server IP was changed and DNS's are playing catch up to update their tables. When this happens it can take a few days for all of them to catch up.

We can change the setup to have a dedicated IP if we like. It would change our upkeep costs but would resolve any issues with DNS's lagging behind everytime the IP is changed. Or at least allow access via IP if for some reason the DNS that you are running will not resolve the address correctly.
Author:  Bonobo [ Fri Apr 11, 2014 5:36 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Site access problem
Oh, JUST now (14:00—14:30 German Time) I got the following on this thread :shock: and on another one:

Quote:
Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator and inform them of the time the error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache Server at http://www.lifein19x19.com Port 80


Greetings, Tom
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