WebmasterWorld server troubles?

AKA: here's a trouble report

[ronburk]

I've generally found WebmasterWorld to have high availability, but the last few days have been pretty iffy, being unable to connect multiple times per day.

When unable to display the home page, inspection shows the DNS information is still obtainable (dig/nslookup resolve an IP address), but it appears I cannot ping the web server or complete a TCP/IP handshake (telnet to port 80 produces no connection).

Interestingly, more than once when service suddenly reappeared, the "Post Reply" button was missing from the page that was served.

Unfortunately, www.anonymizer.com blocks WebmasterWorld, so I was unable to get a second opinion of connectivity via them.

FWIW...

[Brett_Tabke]

whats a trace route say?

everything is working good on this end...

[ronburk]

I'll try to collect a traceroute next time I see it. If you see no problems there, then it may be a regional problem that's been escaping repair because of its intermittent and narrow nature.

Thanks.

[AcsCh]

I can't access webmasterworld. Always get a "Forbidden", since some weeks. Got now finally a workaround via surfshield. Looks like my IP (range) is blocked? (I'm a nice guy, promised! ;) )

I've submitted a bug report a few days ago, but no reply so far.

Anybody there letting me in again? ;) Would be higly appreciated.

[ronburk]

OK, here we go. 11:50PM, PDT, 9/16/2005, webmasterworld is inaccessible. This time (not sure it's the same problem as previous times), the name servers are down (tried to point nslookup at both ns.westhost.net and ns2.westhost.net). Got second and third opinions from various DNS lookup CGI gateways around the web -- none of them could get a response from the name servers either. Cannot ping them at all.

Possibly there is an intermittent problem with the name servers, and DNS caching is allowing most WebmasterWorld users to not notice the problem. Or, it could still be an intermittent problem in a significant pipe connecting the name server to a reasonably large part of the country (didn't get the IP addresses / locations of all the second opinion DNS lookups I did -- maybe they're all West Coast, for example).

With as much traffic as WebmasterWorld gets, a look through the name server query logs might yield clues (e.g., no queries coming in at that time, or none coming in from a large part of the country).

Or maybe this was a known outage and I've wasted my time :-).