"Unknown host" when accessing site from Japan

Works fine if I use a proxy server

[MichaelBluejay]

I'm from Texas and traveling in Japan at present. I used to be able to log onto my state's employment office website (texasworkforce.org) to pay my taxes, but for the last several days I've been getting "Failed to connect" with my browser. I tried to ping with the terminal and got "ping: cannot resolve texasworkforce.org: Unknown host". So I've assumed the site was down.

Then on a hunch, I went to an anonymous proxy server page, typed in the domain, and it came up fine. Unfortunately I can't log in and pay my taxes with the anonymous server, because they typically don't support POST forms and https.

If I understand this issue correctly, the problem is that my ISP's DNS server is lame. My Mac OS X Network preferences has a field where I manually type in a DNS Server (and a separate field for Search Domains, whatever that is), and I've tried putting some addresses in both that I found on a website that lists some Root Nameservers, but the result is the same: I can load every site except the one I want.

Is the solution really that I need to type in a proper DNS Server address, and if so, where do you get it? Or is something else going on?

[jtara]

I get "cannot resolve domain" myself.

Sounds like they have problems.

Recently, somebody in Washington accidentally deleted the entire .ca.gov domain (CAlifornia GOVernment), though it was brought back up in a few hours. But this is a .org, Texas doesn't have a gubenator, and for gosh sakes - the President is from there. Naw, nobody in Washington is going to "accidentally" delete Texas! ;)

Ah, I see that "www" resolves, but "non-www" doesn't. They should have a redirect in place, but don't.

However, the host is still unreachable even then. That is, "www" resolves, but there's no host responding on Port 80.

The proxy may have had a cached copy of the home page.

[MichaelBluejay]

Thanks for checking this out.

The companion site, www.twc.state.tx.us, is also down, but Google cached it on October 15.

But if the site were truly down, I'd expect there to be a news article about it, but I couldn't find anything by searching current news. Also, my contact at the commission won't return my calls. Weird. Maybe they've been taken over by aliens, or revolutionaries....