International website accessibility

Access errors in different countries?

[daosmith]

Recently a client for whom I had designed a simple site moved overseas to the UK, and apparently a lot of people who have tried to access it over there are having difficulties... now as far as I know there are no problems here (Australia) - I myself have accessed the site from several different computers all using different ISPs, on various browsers etc. etc.

Has this ever happened to anyone else, and if so, how did you solve the problem? Could it be a domain name server error, a hosting error, or is it likely to be some feature of the site itself?

Needless to say, the whole situation is intensely irritating for both the client and myself, as one of the major draws of the world wide web is that it is supposed to be, well, world wide!

[RonPK]

difficulties...

What kind of difficulties?

[daosmith]

As far as I can gather from my client, 404 not found errors - although the subject of his email was 'access denied' - but neither he nor his associates are particularly computer literate so it's very difficult to be certain.

I thought it might be to do with the file permissions on the unix server, but I don't know why this would cause problems in the UK but not here - anyway they seem fairly standard drwxr-xr-x and -rw-r--r-- for directories and html/image files respectively...

Any help is much appreciated :)

[RonPK]

Hrmpf... could be almost anything: a firewall on your clients PC or LAN, his provider's proxy server, his provider's DNS server...

[daosmith]

Yes but the fault is not on his system - rather it is on several others belonging to his friends and associates. It seems a bit foolhardy to assume that they are all sharing the same ISP, and even if they are, why should this particular site be affected, and not others?

[A_Amin]

Would you plz. explain your problem in more detail, It doesn't seem to be a serious problem, but you had better check your all settings from the beginning. and copy the errs here, you are recieving.

Best Regards

[daosmith]

Hi A_Amin - Unfortunately I can't relay the errors because I can't reproduce them - whenever I test the site here in Australia things seem fine. I've tested it on various ISPs and using several browsers without a (major) glitch.

The problem is I can't exactly travel all the way to the UK and see the error in action, so I have to rely on what my client says - and as I said before, he's not a technical boffin and hence the info he sends me is of limited utility. I've requested that he send more details but I thought that I might as well post here just to see if anyone else has had the same problem, and hence already knows the solution...

[DonRossUK]

This seems relevant, so I thought I'd post it here....

I work for a company that is currently hosting several hundred
domain names.

Customers of these domains are reporting that different domains and
at different times are not resolvable but only at specific locations.
This sometimes happens for hours at a time without specific reason.
When researching these reports using about 5 other sites distributed
over the UK, no problem is noted. Yet the customers are to say
the least pointing to us as the source of the problem.
These customers have web sites on these domains and so the accesses
to these sites (and attempted resolutions) can come nearly from
anywhere.

I understand propogation issues, broken DNSs, network congestion
issues. But again trying to tell the web site hosters that their
customers cannot get access due to their customers' local issue
is really a problem. They get kinda annoyed and do not understand.
The customer base are those people involved in web site production
but do not really understand the underpinnings of the internet.

It is feared that this is happening more often to our company
than others but I have no data to support this. Could this be
some type of competative attack too?

As things are properly configured and functional on this end,
I'm really at a loss here as to how to proceed.

I guess I'm asking how I should attempt to find and stamp out
this issue which is obviously detrimental to the company. Anybody
have any ideas as to what to do and where to do and what measures
should be taken?

Thanks for your feedback.

DonRoss