Having DNS problems - can anyone help?

[Memnoch]

G'day everyone - as some of you may know, I also administer a sports (cricket and football ie soccer) forum - the ESPNSTAR sports forum (ESPNSTAR is a joint venture between ESPN and Star Sports in Asia). We recently (as in a month ago) moved our forum to a new hosting provider and changed our domain to www.espnstar360.com (my username there is OZGOD).

My problem is, I used to be able to access this forum until about a couple of weeks ago - all of a sudden I started to get a "page is taking too long to load" error with both Firefox and IE7 from my home IP address. I found that I can access the site by using an anonymous proxy or if I am elsewhere from home, but from home I cannot. Obviously there's a problem with my IP, and I suspect it has something to do with DNS.

Here is my tracert of the site (the IP is 66.7.203.240):

code:

---

C:\>tracert www.espnstar360.com



Tracing route to espnstar360.com [66.7.203.240]

over a maximum of 30 hops:



  1     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.1.1

  2     7 ms     7 ms     6 ms  c-3-0-ubr09.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net [73.17

2.250.1]

  3     6 ms     7 ms     6 ms  ge-1-43-ur01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.8

7.157.193]

  4    14 ms     6 ms     8 ms  te-7-1-ur02.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.87

.145.166]

  5     5 ms     6 ms     7 ms  te-9-3-ar01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.87

.145.169]

  6     9 ms     9 ms     9 ms  po-10-ar01.springfield.ma.boston.comcast.net [68

.87.146.22]

  7    11 ms     9 ms    11 ms  po-11-ar01.chartford.ct.hartford.comcast.net [68

.87.146.26]

  8     *        *       14 ms  68.86.90.69

  9    14 ms    13 ms    13 ms  te-9-4.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.71.172.121]

 10    24 ms    18 ms    17 ms  ae-31-51.ebr1.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.68.97.30]

 11    30 ms    20 ms    32 ms  ae-3.ebr1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.132.89]

 12    35 ms    34 ms    32 ms  ae-2.ebr1.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.132.85]

 13    42 ms    42 ms    43 ms  ae-6-6.car1.Orlando1.Level3.net [4.69.133.77]

 14    42 ms    41 ms    50 ms  DimeNoc-edge1.HostDime.com [4.79.116.26]

 15    51 ms    42 ms    42 ms  72-29-88-34.static.dimenoc.com [72.29.88.34]

 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.



Trace complete.



C:\>

[/QUOTE]As you can see it starts timing out on the 16th hop.

Here is my ping:

code:

---

C:\>ping www.espnstar360.com



Pinging espnstar360.com [66.7.203.240] with 32 bytes of data:



Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.



Ping statistics for 66.7.203.240:

    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

[/QUOTE]I have spoken to Comcast but they seem to think it's not their problem. Can anyone provide any suggestions as to what to do?

[Bungleau]

I agree with Comcast... once you get to your 9th hop, you're out of the Comcast realm.

Since an anonymizer works, I *suspect* that you're probably hitting a firewall or blacklist somewhere out there.

Can you get the IP address for the site? If so, trying accessing it directly (http://192.168.1.1). That eliminates DNS entirely.

You'll probably need to follow up with the website host to see what's going on.

[Felix The Assassin]

It will not allow me to access it either. It wants to update 'java' to a version that is not supported by my 'OS'. Well go figure, most web servers are 'nix, and here I can't talk to it.

This leads me to believe that you might have a 'java' error as well.

Good luck.

[Memnoch]

Originally posted by Bungleau: I agree with Comcast... once you get to your 9th hop, you're out of the Comcast realm. Since an anonymizer works, I *suspect* that you're probably hitting a firewall or blacklist somewhere out there. Can you get the IP address for the site? If so, trying accessing it directly (http://192.168.1.1). That eliminates DNS entirely. You'll probably need to follow up with the website host to see what's going on.

The IP address for the site is 66.7.203.240. I tried accessing it directly, but I have the same problem - page takes too long to load.

Felix - I'm not getting a Java error though - just a page takes too long to load. And if I had a Java issue, then in theory I shouldn't be able to access the site even with a proxy, right? But I can access it with a proxy or anonymizer, so I'm almost certain it's to do with my IP address.

[dplax]

It is possible that somewhere along the way the routing table of one of the servers has gone awry, and tries to send you on a non-default route, which is longer. Your requests might be reaching the server without a problem, but since they would be taking too long, IE and Firefox think that there is a problem and give you an error page.

[dplax]

Hrmmm...actually just ran a tracert myself. The last hop you get to is the last hop there is before the site itself, so scrap my previous theory.

15 121 ms 120 ms 108 ms ae-2.ebr1.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.132.85]
16 117 ms 116 ms 117 ms ae-6-6.car1.Orlando1.Level3.net [4.69.133.77]
17 116 ms 117 ms 116 ms DimeNoc-edge1.HostDime.com [4.79.116.26]
18 119 ms 118 ms 116 ms 72-29-88-34.static.dimenoc.com [72.29.88.34]
19 119 ms 116 ms 117 ms elite.host-care.com [66.7.203.240]

So it would well and truly seem that 72-29-88-34.static.dimenoc.com doesn't want to let you continue on to your target...

Edit: or the site itself has your IP blacklisted. You should contact the website admin to ask about that.

[ 05-06-2007, 04:27 AM: Message edited by: dplax ]

[Bungleau]

Sorry I didn't realize you'd already included the IP in your original post... guess it helps to read once in a while [img]smile.gif[/img]

I tried the IP and got a "site waiting to be set up" page. I tried espnstar360, and got to the forums within six seconds. Looks like it's behaving for me...

[dplax]

Going to the IP address will take you to the hosting companies site, they do filtering according to the URL you go to (several sites probably hosted on the same server)

[Memnoch]

Originally posted by dplax: Hrmmm...actually just ran a tracert myself. The last hop you get to is the last hop there is before the site itself, so scrap my previous theory. 15 121 ms 120 ms 108 ms ae-2.ebr1.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.132.85] 16 117 ms 116 ms 117 ms ae-6-6.car1.Orlando1.Level3.net [4.69.133.77] 17 116 ms 117 ms 116 ms DimeNoc-edge1.HostDime.com [4.79.116.26] 18 119 ms 118 ms 116 ms 72-29-88-34.static.dimenoc.com [72.29.88.34] 19 119 ms 116 ms 117 ms elite.host-care.com [66.7.203.240] So it would well and truly seem that 72-29-88-34.static.dimenoc.com doesn't want to let you continue on to your target...

Why is this? What would be a logical reason for this?

Edit: or the site itself has your IP blacklisted. You should contact the website admin to ask about that.

When you say website admin, do you mean the hosting provider? Because I'm one of the forum administrators for that site, and the first thing I checked was to see if anyone had banned my IP - nobody had.

Do you think it's worth asking Comcast if I can get new DNS servers and plug these in manually? What's the downside to that? Do you guys think the problem's with DNS or with something else?

[ 05-08-2007, 01:53 AM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

[dplax]

Your IP could be blocked by the forum or the hosting provider. Since you've checked the first, that isn't the one.

I don't think the problem is at Comcast, since they route you in the right direction. Have you tried from another PC in the same Comcast subnetwork whether you can get on?