DNS troubles - definitely in UK, not sure is elsewhere too?

Zzzzzeb
edited December 1969 in Lounge
Looks like agile have some DNS issues. I couldn’t get access to agile website today - I'm on Tiscali. Someone on Virgin internet (a separate ISP) here in the UK told me they hadn't been able to get to it for a few days.

in terminal:

nslookup www.agilewebsolutions.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

I was able to work around this by adding the google dns 8.8.8.8 on the end of of the list of DNS servers, and then it'll try when the others fail.

The fact it's not returning old information (so its not ISP cache issue), but instead failing, sounds like there is a problem with the DNS configuration somewhere.

Comments

  • ChaMouse
    edited December 1969
    Have the same problem in Germany. My ISP is Tele2, Germany.

    Unfortunately, those who also experience this problem aren't able to access to this forum. So it's unclear how many people are actually affected as they probably can't report back to you...
  • jfahrni
    edited December 1969
    Same here in Switzerland

    connection with Cablecom is OK, but i cant resolve the domain via VTX
  • macpug
    macpug
    Community Member
    edited December 1969
    ChaMouse and jfahrni, welcome to the Forums!
    Someone asked me about this yesterday, I think he was in Italy, but can't remember off the top of my head. I gave him a different URL, and he said it worked for him, so try http://www.agilewebsolutions.com and see if that works for you guys. Not sure what you're using. He had a different URL recorded. We'll see if we find anything else.
  • ChaMouse
    edited December 1969
    Sorry... http://www.agilewebsolutions.com/ is exactly the URL I used before. Without DNS workaround, I still can't connect to your website, nor can 1Passwork update.
  • jpgoldberg
    jpgoldberg
    1Password Alumni
    edited December 1969
    Hi all,

    As Stu said, we are trying to track this down. It looks like a caching DNS server somewhere in northwest Europe (we've seen report of this from Ireland, the UK, and Norway) is providing incorrect information. We need to help trying to track this down.

    Could anyone who is seeing this problem (while they are seeing it) please paste the following commands in Terminal (Terminal.app can be found in /Applications/Utilities )?

    dig www.agilewebsolutions.com
    


    and

    cat /etc/resolv.conf
    


    and paste the responses into a response here or send it to support@agile.ws. The information included in that will tell us about how name resolution (the stuff that turns something like www.agilewebsoltions.com into a number like 74.208.8.44 )

    That will be a great help.

    As Stu suggested, you may wish to set up your system to use Google's DNS service instead of your ISP's. Google's configuration instructions are here:

    http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html

    And I've attached what a Network Settings pane in System Preferences might look like after making these changes.

    For those concerned about privacy, here is Google's privacy statement.

    http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#privacy

    And while this is a personal choice, I am far more comfortable trusting Google with my name resolutions requests then I am with trusting my ISP with the same information. I switched to using Google DNS when it was first announced and have been very happy with it. (I didn't do it in the same manner displayed here however; I run my own DNS servers on my own network and I configured them to forward to Google instead of to my ISP).

    We are really sorry about the difficulties people have been having reaching our site. As far as we can tell, the problem is somewhere in Northwest Europe, but we are looking at everything we can do to make things easier for people.

    Cheers,

    -j
  • Zzzzzeb
    edited December 1969
    Not sure there's anything useful in mine, but here goes..

    dig www.agilewebsolutions.com

    ; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> www.agilewebsolutions.com
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

    dig works fine for e.g. www.google.com

    cat /etc/resolv.conf
    #
    # Mac OS X Notice
    #
    # This file is not used by the host name and address resolution
    # or the DNS query routing mechanisms used by most processes on
    # this Mac OS X system.
    #
    # This file is automatically generated.
    #
    nameserver 212.139.132.22
    nameserver 10.0.0.138

    These are the ISPs dns servers. The second one looks to be a private address (internal to the ISP that is).
  • dteare
    edited December 1969
    I had a nice long message typed but vbulletin's new "quick reply" "feature" ate it again. I'm so looking forward to having time to replace vBulletin :)

    Long story short: we took a shot in the dark and tweaked some settings. If this doesn't fix it by Monday we'll pay for a new DNS service instead of using just GoDaddy.
  • dteare
    edited December 1969
    Oh, I forgot to add, please try all these addresses and see if any work:

  • jpgoldberg
    jpgoldberg
    1Password Alumni
    edited December 1969
    Zzzzzeb wrote:
    Not sure there's anything useful in mine, but here goes..

    dig www.agilewebsolutions.com
    
    ; &lt;&lt;&gt;&gt; DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 &lt;&lt;&gt;&gt; www.agilewebsolutions.com
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
    


    dig works fine for e.g. www.google.com


    That is incredibly useful. Thank you very much. It is also not very good news in our ability to solve this problem. So much of what appears to be going on is beyond our control.


    cat /etc/resolv.conf
    
    [ ... snip ...]
    
    nameserver 212.139.132.22
    nameserver 10.0.0.138
    


    These are the ISPs dns servers.


    The first one is, indeed, your ISPs name server. Unfortunately, it is configured so that it only accepts queries from the Tiscali network and not from outside. So I would like you to try the following (again in Terminal)

    dig @212.139.132.22 -t soa agilewebsolutions.com
    


    and

    dig @212.139.132.22 -t ns agilewebsolutions.com
    


    and

    dig @212.139.132.22 -t a agilewebsolutions.com
    


    and post the output. I would test those myself, but I can't from outside of Tiscali/Tinet network.


    We are seeing that most (all?) affected UK users are with either Tiscali or Sky. The problem, of course, is that only a small portion of affected users have actually managed to contact us, so we don't really have good data on those who can't reach us.

    The second IP address, 10.0.0.138, is almost certainly the address of your home router.

    Another difficulty we face is that various network diagnostic tools like dig actually use a different mechanism in OS X than what your web browser uses for converting names like agilewebsolutions.com into IP addresses.

    Dig and friends reflect the traditional Unix mechanism which I cut my teeth on. Leopard built things into its Directory Services, which I was just coming to grips with when Snow Leopard changed things again to build this into mDNS. The mechanism OS X uses for your web browser appears to differ from what the "Check for Update" in 1Password and Knox uses, so we sometimes find that the updater fails while the other things succeed.

    Again, thank you for all of your help. As Dave said, we are in the process of looking at moving to different DNS servers for our domains.
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