Some users cannot see our site

Is it a firewall issue?

[webboy1]

We have a couple of websites running on our server (windows). I have received a couple of comments from different sources that they are unable to see these sites. They say it looks as though each site is down.

This is strange, as we can see them fine, and the stats show that many other every day can also see them.

I am thinking it is possible a firewall of somthing at the users end that is blocking something within the content of the sites. What this is i am not sure though.

Has anyone experienced this before?

The first person to have problems works for a large organisation that use firewalls, proxies......the lot. The seconed was the folks at DMOZ. Each time i ask them why our site has still not been listed, they come back telling me the site is down......but it isn't.

All help appreciated in this one.

Cheers
Webboy

[hannamyluv]

What ISP are they using when they veiw?

You mentioned the corporate person, so it probably not this, but we had an issue with AOL a year or so back that had a different effect of our site, but could be what is affecting yours.

AOL caches pages on their own servers (if I understood correctly) and they were having problems cacheing ours. Maybe they aren't cacheing yours at all for some reason, which would make it appear to some users that your site is not there.

[webboy1]

This is why people shouldn't use AOL. I stopped using it a long time ago for many different reasons.

However, my manager has AOL, and he can see the sites fine. Although he has had the same problem with other sites in the past.

I will email the people who were having problems and ask them if they are on AOL.

Thanks
Webboy

[ppg]

Webboy1, did you ever get to the bottom of this?

I've just had reports of the same thing, uk site, user on an AOL account can't access it.

The odd thing is that although the error message states that his browser can't find the site (which suggests a dns error), he's getting error number 500 - server error.

I got him to run a tracert to our domain from his machine and it stops at what appears to be his AOL proxy server. Other sites work ok.

Perhaps its a routing issue between aol and telehouse (where our server is located)?

> were having problems cacheing ours
Thats interesting - how did you find that out?

[webboy1]

Yes, PG, we are indeed still having problems. Its fortunate that neither of the sites are of any huge importance, so we are not panicing yet.....but ideally we would like to fix it.

I have had problems like this before, and usually somewhere down the research line the infamous 3 letters appear "A, O and L".

Im sure they have hundreds of plus points, but surely a service as big as theirs should be perfect in everyway.

Oh, well, i just need to find some fixes.

Cheers
Webboy

[TallTroll]

Get your host to check the DNS zone files. I've seen this, where a site was randomly unavailable, and we finally tracked it down to errors in zone file replication. Once those were fixed, the site behaved perfectly again

[ppg]

>Get your host to check the DNS zone files

Cheers TT, you may be onto something there, although it doesn't sound like replication to the secondary dns is the issue.

Just spoke to the domain name registrar (seperate from the hosting) and even though they told me a fortnight ago that there were no problems at their end, today their helpdesk tells me that our record is held on an old server and "that might be the problem"...

Time to move the domain name methinks.