ISP Shananigans
Posted on 23 January 2007, at 9:29 pm, by Judie Lipsett
If you are reading this then you may not have been affected, but I know that there were quite a few people emailing me all day to report the site was down. Well, it was and it wasn’t…
At midnight last night, our host did a regularly scheduled update…but somewhere in the process our “OS kernel was corrupted.” Yeah, I’m not sure exactly what that entails, but it’s bad! 
We didn’t lose anything, but Ewdi worked frantically until 7 am trying to get all of the sites under his care back online, and just to be safe, he grabbed a new server for Gear Diary.
I swapped the DNS addresses at 7:30, and for many people – that soon corrected the problem. But I got to find out the hard way that SuddenLink / Cox evidently does not refresh their cache but maybe once every 24 hours. So in other words, I am still unable to pull Gear Diary up, whereas others were able to less than an hour after the switch.
Lovely…
Through the beauty of Anonymizer (which has a 7 day free trial, by the way), I have been able to access the site and make sure everything was okay – but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to sign on the correct way – meaning, without using a proxy server – until maybe tomorrow morning.
I’ve heard Gear Diary is still down in areas of Chicago, New Jersey, Taiwan, and of course Texas – and there is no telling how many other areas have been affected. Just as many others are telling me that it is up, running and responding quickly.
So I guess that the site will appear to be down for some, at least until all of these ISPs finally get their acts together and refresh their DNS servers; which just seems…unbelievably lame, but that’s what’s going on. 
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10 Comments For This Post
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Yeah I have been able to access it all day here. Stupid that they only update DNS once a day!
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Well, I guess I’ll find out tomorrow if it’s even once a day.
January 23rd, 2007 at 11:26 pm
I couldn’t access the site until 7 pm CST here in Tennessee. Blogger was having some hiccups also. Ewdi and Judie – thanks for the valiant effort – technology – sometimes it makes you want to grind your teeth!
January 24th, 2007 at 7:50 am
You may want to try opendns.(http://www.opendns.com) It’s pretty reliable and DNS records updated often. Another way to access your server while your ISP doesn’t is setting up your TCP/IP DNS address manually to what your server uses. This will definitely let you have an access to your server though you may not be able to reach majority of other sides of internet. It’s useful when you need to make quick changes on your site which can’t wait until ISP or OpenDNS’s cache catch up.
January 24th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Thanks ignar! Everything finally came back online for me about 12:30 am last night, I got a flood of Gear Diary email and the site came up without Anonymizer’s help; what a relief!
I will definitely look at Open DNS, but I am dismayed that there will still be tons of ISPs that are not refreshing in a timely manner. I realize that it is not everyday that a site changes DNS without keeping a mirror of their previous site still in place, but it seemed like a pretty large hole in the system.
Ah well, all’s better now and there’s no use crying over spilled milk.
January 24th, 2007 at 11:14 am
It was never down in Los Angeles as far as I could tell.
January 24th, 2007 at 11:34 am
I was able to access it in Chicago after 7am today. I was up to about 2am, and it was down then.
January 24th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
@Jerry – Lucky you!
January 24th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I could be wrong, but the way I understand it it’s not necessarily a problem with your ISP. Even if they refreshed their DNS servers right away with your new IP address, other DNS servers (or even your PC) have cached your old address and there’s a propogation delay built into the algorithm that *can* take up to 24 hours to wind its way around the world. (It usually doesn’t take that long.)
It’s not the fastest thing in the world, but it’s not bad for a 20+ year old protocol (and its origins in ARPAnet are almost 40 years old).
January 24th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Well, I just got an email from New York and the site is still down for a reader there (hi Stan!).
It’s so funny how we take things like “the internet working” for granted until they…don’t. Spoiled isn’t even the word for it.