Indymedia Server Outages

national | indymedia ireland | news report

Tuesday March 27, 2007 20:01

by Chekov - 1 of IMC

In the last few days, some users will have experienced trouble accessing the indymedia website. This was due to a problem with the domain's DNS configuration - the system which turns domain names (indymedia.ie) into computer addresses. We believe that we have now fixed the problem and we apologise for the service interruptions.

Technically, what happened was that our parent nameserver lacked a glue entry for our domain nameservers. This did not pose a problem as our nameservers were using an old reverse DNS name, which refered to a different domain. However, over the weekend, this DNS entry expired and, although we changed our DNS entries to the new hostname of our servers, we lacked a glue entry and so DNS servers were incapable of resolving the circular dependencies (the domain nameservers were on the domain itself).

We have now fixed the problem and we should hopefully not see any such outages again in the future. Due to the nature of DNS, a system that relies heavily on caching, changes can take up to 24 hours to propagate across the network, so it may take some time for some users to be able to view the site again. This propagation delay also makes it very tricky to debug DNS problems.

Our apologies again.

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Comments (8 of 8)

Any news on changing the time on the clock?

by Clockwatcher

Tue Mar 27, 2007 20:20

still on GMT

Time is fixed

by Chekov

Tue Mar 27, 2007 20:26

back-dated too.

Glad to have you back

by AvTuring

Wed Mar 28, 2007 01:03

I was sorry about the glue spilt into your computers by the altar servers.
Still I imagine the arms caches are now all emptied what with the peace process and all. I find a handy tip is to use lemon juice on the net curtains and stack dead rams on by the fireplace wall, provided they don't overflow.
Hope that heps
Alan

Nice to See Indymedia Back Up

by Kieran O'Sullivan - None

Wed Mar 28, 2007 10:42

Oh yea I know how painful DNS can be. Finding out what was wrong must have been a very frustrating effort.
Thanks to the person who gave up their weekend to solve that one.

Site went down!?!? or is "out" how we say it now?

by Bb

Wed Mar 28, 2007 14:10

I never noticed. doesn't matter - nothing happened anyway. Well done you techno people. Yet again you've proved you're up to glue, filling out forms &ensuring the problem goes away & never comes back. Will we ever be getting that freephone help-line now?

There are still glitches Chekhov old boy....

by Ray - Personal Capacity Inc.

Wed Mar 28, 2007 17:01

I've just spent this afternoon surfing and much was my frustration when, for much of the afternoon, I couldn't access Indymedia.ie. Towards the end of the session I changed browser (from Firefox to Netscape) out of a sense of curiosity and then, mirabile dictu, I could access Indymedia first go and no delay! I wonder are there browser-specific problems that the IMC are aware of (here I have to add that I sometimes have had trouble in the past year accessing Indymedia.ie via Firefox), and whether these are fixable or not. I'd hate to think that the Indymedia-using community would have to resort to using such work-arounds permanently.

Firefox problem

Wed Mar 28, 2007 17:38

I don't think the problem is related to what browser you are using. It sounds like firefox has simply cached the old DNS results for indymedia.ie (browsers do this sort of thing) and it will eventually work again. You could try to select "clear private data" from the firefox tools menu and select "cache" from the box.

Let us know if you still have a problem after trying that.

No problems now!

by Ray - Personal Capacity International

Thu Mar 29, 2007 17:28

Followed what you said Chekov works like a dream now. Thanks.

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Comments (8 of 8)