why the board was down yesterday

Post by **sine nomine** » Sat Nov 18, 2006 2:56 am

(this is a quick and dirty explanation, so forgive me if i oversimplify or leave things out)

the nameservers were down.

the net actually does everything by ip addresses, but domain names are a lot easier to remember (and besides, with domain names you can set things up so that several sites all live at the same ip -- buslist.org, busmail.org, and several other domains all live on the same machine).

when you type in the address "buslist.org," your browser needs to know what ip address goes with that name. it uses the domain name service protocol to look up buslist.org. fist it goes to the root servers, which have information about the broad categories (.com, .org, etc). then it looks at .org and finds out who to ask where buslist is. then it asks that server for the ip address.

so when you set up a domain, you have to designate which nameservers have authoritative information for your domain -- "who should i ask about buslist?"

you can see what the nameservers for a particular domain is by going to http://geektools.com/whois.php and entering a domain name. for bus, they were ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com. mydomain (the service i use) has ns3 and ns4 as well as ns1 and ns2, but i didn't have them set up.

for some reason that's beyond me, their nameservers ns1 and ns2 fell over yesterday. that means that your browser went to the .org server and said "who do i ask about buslist?" it got told to ask ns1.mydomain.com. that failed, so it looked to see who else knew. it got ns2 that time, but that failed too and there weren't any more nameservers for it to try.

i added ns3 and ns4, and i'm going to get secondary dns (domain name service) set up for the domains as well.

deb

b3autifu2l37 · Post by **b3autifu2l37** » Sat Nov 18, 2006 3:01 pm

thanks for clearing that up and letting us know what was up.

(even though some of it was still over my head

)

friarygirl · Post by **friarygirl** » Sat Nov 18, 2006 9:03 pm

Thank you Deb! I have to admit to freaking out a bit, but I'm glad we're all back online together again.

Damn - 36 hours without BUS and I feel lost.

Paradoxis · Post by **Paradoxis** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 1:29 am

Same here Sarah.

For me the trick was to type in the address manually, instead of using any links from either my bookmarks or email notifiations. I think that it's because they would just take me to ns1 or ns2, which fell down. So the trick seemed to be to create a new link by starting over, if you get what I mean.

Anyway, your explanation helped me work out what I needed to do Deb, so thanks!

friarygirl · Post by **friarygirl** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 1:38 am

Paradoxis wrote:For me the trick was to type in the address manually,

Bleaghh!!! Tried that, zillions of times. Tried all "sideways" means of accessing BUS. Whatever, nothing worked. I was beginning to feel WAY left out, cos most of my BUSfriends had had at least a few minutes access, and here in S Spain, not a *sausage*!

Anwyay, it's fixed now. I don't know how you do it, but keep doing it please. To paraphrase Placebo, "Without BUS I'm nowhere".

Sarah

Paradoxis · Post by **Paradoxis** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 1:46 am

The link from BUS Central worked the last time, although it didn't before.

angelic212 · Post by **angelic212** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 2:14 am

i tried several ways to get into bus , but i couldnt get into bus, i was starting to feel rather frustrated, but i was able to cope without bus for those looonnggg hours.
it was hard being without bus, when i really needed to post but for next time something like this happens i will have a plan to help me cope.

friarygirl · Post by **friarygirl** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 2:30 am

Angelic, I think that's a brilliant idea. I don't SI, so I'm more likely to drink to much, or binge.

I'm going to sort out some stuff from coping right now, because I don't like the way I go when I don't have BUS access. Thanks for the reminder.

Sarah

Post by **sine nomine** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 9:28 pm

another way around it is to create a text file called 'hosts' with no extension -- just hosts. windows qill want to make it a .txt file, so you may have to rename it.

the only text it should have in it is

buslist.org 213.232.85.35

your browser looks for a hosts file first, and having one with that in it tells the browser to go to 213.232.85.35 when you type buslist.org.

on windows, this should go in the directory windows runs from (usually c:\windows or c:\wintnt)
on mac classic, it should go in the system preferences folder
on mac os x, it should go in the /etc folder.

deb

silent_scream · Post by **silent_scream** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:15 pm

sine nomine wrote:another way around it is to create a text file called 'hosts' with no extension -- just hosts. windows qill want to make it a .txt file, so you may have to rename it.

the only text it should have in it is

buslist.org 213.232.85.35

your browser looks for a hosts file first, and having one with that in it tells the browser to go to 213.232.85.35 when you type buslist.org.

on windows, this should go in the directory windows runs from (usually c:\windows or c:\wintnt)
on mac classic, it should go in the system preferences folder
on mac os x, it should go in the /etc folder.

deb

Laura · Post by **Laura** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 11:50 pm

Can you be more specific about what you don't get? Is it what you do, or why it works, that's puzzling?

silent_scream · Post by **silent_scream** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 12:38 am

I was joking.

why the board was down yesterday

why the board was down yesterday

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