Is AskMe down? (Jan. 22, 2006)

January 22, 2006 4:21 AM

Is AskMe down? Can't get to it via comments or the main page, on firefox or IE, on two separate computers. This is a new one - I've never noticed just one segment of the site going down before.
posted by By The Grace of God to Bugs at 4:21 AM (23 comments total)

Working here. bet 6 and 7 CST
posted by lampshade at 4:45 AM on January 22, 2006

Not here in the uk, maybe it is some weird DNS issue?
posted by By The Grace of God at 4:54 AM on January 22, 2006

Working here 8:12AM EST
posted by Ryvar at 5:13 AM on January 22, 2006

Has worked here all morning (EET). A DNS issue or whatever.
posted by keijo at 5:28 AM on January 22, 2006

I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me last night some time... but it works now
posted by rxrfrx at 6:14 AM on January 22, 2006

just now metatalk refused to load for me. 20 seconds later, here i am. intermittent DNS.
posted by quonsar at 6:40 AM on January 22, 2006

A #tapes chatter in the UK can't get the DNS to resolve right now, either.
posted by Ryvar at 7:00 AM on January 22, 2006

Just got home and still no loady. Polling UKers: working for you?
posted by By The Grace of God at 8:10 AM on January 22, 2006

something is wrong with metafilter DNS. not sure what.

But, I put this:

70.86.84.162 www.metafilter.com
70.86.84.162 metatalk.metafilter.com
70.86.84.162 ask.metafilter.com

in my hosts file, and now everything works.
posted by jaded at 8:34 AM on January 22, 2006

I can get to everything but Projects.
posted by veronitron at 8:51 AM on January 22, 2006

I've been having problems with all metafilter sites resolving (DNS) for a day or two.

jaded, that'll work, until it doesn't. :)
posted by intermod at 8:59 AM on January 22, 2006

Yeah, agreed with jaded, the DNS is on holiday but adding those 3 lines to your HOSTS will let you back in without a hiccup.
UK
posted by NinjaPirate at 9:05 AM on January 22, 2006

The DNS server is down again.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:06 AM on January 22, 2006

The DNS server doesn't care about mefi people?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:13 AM on January 22, 2006

DNS should be back now.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:37 AM on January 22, 2006

Thanks Matt! :)
posted by By The Grace of God at 11:21 AM on January 22, 2006

Matt, I'd be happy to help you get set up with a multiple-server configuration. It's frustrating when I can't get my MeFi fix! The entire DNS protocol is designed around the idea of multiple servers, so it's really easy.

Most ISPs offer name service backup. The ISP configures their machines as slaves; you configure your machine as the master and tell it about the slaves. Then you change your WHOIS info to point to their servers as well as yours.

From then on, you make changes like you normally do. Updates are automatically propagated to the ISP's servers. If your main server goes down, the domain stays up with the old info, usually for about a week, before the whole domain goes away. And the failover is transparent and invisible to your userbase.

It would give you a lot more time to fix problems with eod.com's nameserver.

Again, I'd be happy to help you with this. It won't take long. Once the ISP has been notified and has their end ready, the changes on your end (assuming you're running BIND, anyway) will usually take only about 15 minutes, and will require no downtime.

If you're using something other than plain text files on normal BIND, it may take a bit longer, but it should still be easy.

If you'd like the help, you can reach me at {metafilter_ at %malor.c_om!, less all the strange punctuation.
posted by Malor at 1:50 PM on January 22, 2006

I know, I know, I will be adding backup DNS this week.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:55 PM on January 22, 2006

Offer remains if you'd like help. I do this stuff professionally. :)
posted by Malor at 3:21 PM on January 22, 2006

Metaftiler being down is my fault. I host the DNS and the box has been having trouble lately. I hope it's finally resolved.

The DNS slave I used went down recently and I haven't had a chance to find another secondary. I've got a guy on the hook and hope to get things set back up shortly.

Apologies to everyone.
posted by gknauss at 4:00 PM on January 22, 2006

Linux is not as stable as it used to be, and Debian Unstable is including 2.6.15, which so far has been a disaster for me... Win95 was better. 2.6.14 seems okay, and I've moved to that specific package, instead of just "linux-image-2.6".

Debian is very common in the ISP world, which is why I'm mentioning this.

I'll tell ya, FreeBSD looks better all the time....
posted by Malor at 4:09 PM on January 22, 2006

I'm running FC3 and for the most part it's been very good. A handful of times over the past six months, though, the box has just gone away: it pings but none of the services respond. For a while I blamed a DoS -- someone, say, joe-jobbing the box and SpamAssassin reacting badly. But today, I took a lot at the load-logs of a monitor I installed and, nope, the box stopped responding at 1:10am PST with only a 0.04 15-minute load average.

The guys at my hosting company ran a filesystem check and found some problems, and the box came back up right after they were fixed, so... I dunno. I can think of a lot of problems that a broken filesystem would cause, but I never would have thought to check it on my own given the symptoms.

Anyway. I'll get the seconary DNS set up properly this week, so at least MeFi won't be affected by any incompetence on my part in the future.
posted by gknauss at 6:27 PM on January 22, 2006

Malor - any ISP running Unstable on their production servers should know better. Stable is exactly that - rock solid, and Unstable is as it should be - a testing ground.
posted by benzo8 at 2:55 AM on January 23, 2006