Advice needed re Network problems in Spain

[martindell]

Yesterday the Spanish internet hub in Madrid was affected by a local bombing incident and although we host in Chicago, our sites are now invisibe to the entire population of Spain (one of our main markets) Telefonica are (of course) working on the problem but have no idea if or when a fix will be forthcoming.

Does anyone have any practical suggestions how we can mirror or duplicate our server in some way so that we continue getting Spanish traffic while the problem is being resolved?

All our sites are MySQL/php driven and constantly changing so it's not a simple forwarding job!

Any help or advice appreciated.

Best Regards
Martin

[mipapage]

If the hub there is down, then the surfers most likely don't have internet access, no?

btw, I doubt your site is invisible to the entire pop of Spain, just those few users who route through that hub. If traffic is low today, understand that this 'local bombing incident' is the second largest terrosist attack in recent European history, and people here are pretty spooked.

[martindell]

Thanks for the reply, no, general internet access is ok, it just seems that some routes to some servers are down. From my ADSL connection I can't access our own servers but nor can I get at alexa.com or websitepulse.com. I can dial up with aniother provider and everything's OK. Weird thing is, using the ADSl line, I have FTP and SSH access to our servers as normal but no POP3 or HTTP - also I can tracert and ping. BTW, where is 'there'

[mipapage]

Hey martindell, re-reading I realize you are in Spain (possibly Madrid, ergo the 'local').

I'm in Alicante but on Ya.com. Some clients of mine do not seem to have any trouble and they are on Telefonica, but of course here, which is why I theorized what I did above, so maybe your sites are only down for a few people...

...people down here are pretty affected

[elguiri]

I'm in Madrid too, and finding quite a lot of Spanish sites unavailable (although I can see my own sites among others), but I wasn't aware of the cause until I saw this thread.

Personally I'm so shaken up by what's happened I'm just going to take the day off and go to the demonstration. The net can wait for a day. I'll maybe think about making money again on Monday.

[martindell]

aha, I'm in Granada - I meant 'local' as in Spain. can you access alexa.com, kyero.com and websitepulse.com OK? I think I'll be giving up today too and see what Monday brings

[mipapage]

Huh, no alexa for me, and come to think of it there are a couple of other sites that I wasn't able to access either and I know that they are on the same server...

Never even thought this could be why...

[martindell]

Yes it's a strange problem, but it started to take effect here yesterday afternoon. I spent all afternoon on the phone to Ya.com yesterday and all morning today with Telefonica and eventually Telefonica admitted that they had major problems in Madrid (obviously) and it would take days to get sorted. I can dial around the problem but that doesn't help the 100 or so clients we have who can't access their email or web sites. Oh well, small problems by comparison I suppose.

[taivu]

Martin, do you run a dedicated server? If so, a workaround is to set the MTU to 1400, since the problem seems to be that packets bigger than that get fragmented. I could not access our server using Terra's modem connection, but after this change all sites hosted on our server were accessible.

Setting the MTU is as simple as (in *nix):

ifconfig eth0 mtu 1400

(Replace "eth0" with the name of the interface in use)

I take no credit for figuring this out (although I should have, after all the tracerouting and pinging I have done during the last 2 days) - the credit goes to hard working tecnicians at ThePlanet (ServerMatrix) and EV1Servers as well as the active users who provided them with traceroutes and other information.

Let us know if that helped.

[martindell]

You are a life saver! works a treat. I have no idea why that works, but it certainly does - thanks very much! What is the 'normal' MTU setting?

[taivu]

Glad to hear it worked :) The default MTU size is 1500 for Ethernet networks.

[martindell]

Out of interest, how did you manage to engage the interest of your hosters? I posed the problem to ours but they simply responded that all was well in Chicago (where we host). I clearly failed to provide enough information to make them take a closer look. What's your secret?

[taivu]

The secret is that I am the server admin (root) - when it comes to our box, I don't have to convince anyone <G> And when it comes to router etc. issues, it's good to know the datacenter staff knows their business and are eager to help any way they can.

BTW: what is the situation with Timofonica connections? I haven't had time to test if everything is back to normal (using Uni2 myself).

[martindell]

hi, sorry havn't been back here in a while. It all seemed to go back to 'normal' a couple of days later - we've put the mtu back to 1500 and it works fine so I guess that's it until the next crisis.