Hello, Everyone I hope that one of the many geniuses that frequent this list might be able to shed some light on a problem that I am having. I do run Fedora Core 6 (very happily, I must say :)) but this is too off topic, please feel free to contact me off list.
I have fully qualified domain: afolkey2.net. It can USUALLY be found thusly: http://www.afolkey2.net
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean: http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
I use the free dynamic dns service from dnsexit.com. The nameservers that they have me point my domain to are as follows: ns1.dnsexit.com ns2.dnsexit.com
When I noticed the severe issues described above, I ran "ping" on each of those two servers. The edited results of "ping ns1.dnsexit.com" look something like this: PING ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=417 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=436 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=375 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=349 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=258 ms
--- ns1.dnsexit.com ping statistics --- 49 packets transmitted, 46 received, 6% packet loss, time 48033ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 91.901/433.380/827.993/223.834 ms
That didn't look very fair :), so I ran ping on that server again: PING ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=88.1 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=98.5 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=89.0 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=86.9 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=89.0 ms
--- ns1.dnsexit.com ping statistics --- 87 packets transmitted, 84 received, 3% packet loss, time 86027ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 85.584/91.493/108.933/4.825 ms
But, if I run "ping ns2.dnsexit.com" the results (again edited) look like this:
PING ns2.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=23.2 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=23.1 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=21.1 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=18.6 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=5 ttl=53 time=23.3 ms
--- ns2.dnsexit.com ping statistics --- 42 packets transmitted, 42 received, 0% packet loss, time 41040ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 18.630/25.121/40.702/4.839 ms
In this case, the times seem much quicker, and you will notice that unlike when I pinged ns1.dnsexit.com, there was no packet loss. But you will also notice that when I ran "ping ns2.dnsexit.com" that the server that appeared to be the one that was queried is "nd188.dnsexit.com", not "ns2.dnsexit.com"
I don't know what (if any) the significance of that fact is. I merely observe it.
If nothing else, I THINK I can safely assume that they are having some issues on their end. Nonetheless, do any of you have any suggestions about free dynamic DNS services that you have had good fortune with?
Anyway, thank you in advance for any help that you may be able to give me.
Steven P. Ulrick
On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 04:30 -0500, Linus Ulrick wrote:
I have fully qualified domain: afolkey2.net. It can USUALLY be found thusly: http://www.afolkey2.net
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean: http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
The website didn't load, first go, here. But the stats page did. Very odd. Both did eventually load, but both slowly. Though, since the pages I had to look at were all "generated" things (stats and photo galleries), that's not uncommon. Such things are often painfully slow, in my experience.
It should be noted that making stats public can subject you to referrer spam: Spammers linking to your pages, hoping to turn up in your stats, and hoping that you publish your stats, or publish what refers to you in some other way, so that you give them free advertising. You can get deluged by them, and some quite unsavoury things, too.
I use the free dynamic dns service from dnsexit.com. The nameservers that they have me point my domain to are as follows: ns1.dnsexit.com ns2.dnsexit.com
When I noticed the severe issues described above, I ran "ping" on each of those two servers. The edited results of "ping ns1.dnsexit.com" look something like this: PING ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=417 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=436 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=375 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=349 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=258 ms
[tim@bigblack ~]$ ping ns1.dnsexit.com PING ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=227 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=227 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=226 ms
I got fairly consistent results for either name server, and fairly similar ones for the webserver address:
[tim@bigblack ~]$ ping afolkey2.net PING afolkey2.net (74.134.123.247) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 74-134-123-247.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.134.123.247): icmp_seq=1 ttl=132 time=258 ms 64 bytes from 74-134-123-247.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.134.123.247): icmp_seq=2 ttl=132 time=257 ms 64 bytes from 74-134-123-247.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.134.123.247): icmp_seq=3 ttl=132 time=260 ms
It should also be noted that pinging a machine is quite a different thing than using some other service on it. You can get good or bad ping responses that are contrary to how their services respond. All a ping test is how they respond to pings. :-\
I did a "dig" on your domain name, which is just looking up domain records, the thing that you need to test, and got the following response:
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig www.afolkey2.net
; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>> www.afolkey2.net ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 58276 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2
;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.afolkey2.net. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION: www.afolkey2.net. 120 IN CNAME afolkey2.net. afolkey2.net. 120 IN A 74.134.123.247
;; AUTHORITY SECTION: afolkey2.net. 120 IN NS ns1.dnsexit.com. afolkey2.net. 120 IN NS ns2.dnsexit.com.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns1.dnsexit.com. 172799 IN A 63.223.76.173 ns2.dnsexit.com. 172799 IN A 64.182.102.188
;; Query time: 890 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.2#53(192.168.1.2) ;; WHEN: Thu Aug 9 19:15:18 2007 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 143
Which, while being about four times longer to complete (the query time) than looking up some other domains I just tried (around 200 mS instead of around 900 mS), is still not terribly slow. Certainly not as slow as their webserver was to respond. So, I'd be more concerned about things other than their DNS servers.
You probably also want to do some tests on the HTTP server response time, but I don't have anything to tell you how to test that. That's response time, more than download speed. People will put up with things taking a little while to finish downloading, so long as they start fairly promptly.
when I ran "ping ns2.dnsexit.com" that the server that appeared to be the one that was queried is "nd188.dnsexit.com", not "ns2.dnsexit.com"
The same here, but forward and reverse name look ups don't have to match (a fact often overlooked by some overzealous anti-spam people). It's quite likely that whatever does their second name server does more than just be a name server, and they might have named the device for that purpose rather than just the name serving feature.
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short ns1.dnsexit.com 63.223.76.173 [tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short -x 63.223.76.173 ns1.dnsexit.com.
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short ns2.dnsexit.com 64.182.102.188 [tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short -x 64.182.102.188 nd188.dnsexit.com.
However, this is revealing (below). There's no A record (or any answer) to trying to find out the IP for their second name server, by the other domain name. That could well be a problem, it's just as well that's their second name server, not the first one.
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig nd188.dnsexit.com
; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>> nd188.dnsexit.com ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 50072 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION: ;nd188.dnsexit.com. IN A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION: dnsexit.com. 1195 IN SOA ns2.dnsexit.com. admin.netdorm.com. 2000060701 12000 2400 604800 1200
;; Query time: 15 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.2#53(192.168.1.2) ;; WHEN: Thu Aug 9 19:37:16 2007 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 89
You might bring that to their attention, and ask them if they know why things are running slowly at the moment.
If nothing else, I THINK I can safely assume that they are having some issues on their end. Nonetheless, do any of you have any suggestions about free dynamic DNS services that you have had good fortune with?
I occasionally use no-ip.com, which I see is slightly faster at responding (667 mS). But then that's the speed between me and them, and will be different between them and someone else. Likewise, with yours.
On Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:42:15 +0930 Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 04:30 -0500, Linus Ulrick wrote:
I have fully qualified domain: afolkey2.net. It can USUALLY be found thusly: http://www.afolkey2.net
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean: http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
The website didn't load, first go, here. But the stats page did. Very odd. Both did eventually load, but both slowly. Though, since the pages I had to look at were all "generated" things (stats and photo galleries), that's not uncommon. Such things are often painfully slow, in my experience.
See my response in another part of this thread that explains how I fixed my problem. See especially my references to /etc/hosts. Usually, my gallery works great. Even on a Windows ME dial-up machine that I tried it on. Of course, sometimes it is a little slow. What I was seeing locally (I THINK "locally" is a big key here) was a whole other animal entirely.
It should be noted that making stats public can subject you to referrer spam: Spammers linking to your pages, hoping to turn up in your stats, and hoping that you publish your stats, or publish what refers to you in some other way, so that you give them free advertising. You can get deluged by them, and some quite unsavoury things, too.
Point well taken. The link is now gone. Thank you very much for pointing this out to me :)
It should also be noted that pinging a machine is quite a different thing than using some other service on it. You can get good or bad ping responses that are contrary to how their services respond. All a ping test is how they respond to pings. :-\
You have taught me something else now. Two things so far in this email...
Also, I will look through the parts of your response that I trimmed out and see if there is anything I can use from those parts.
Thank you again for your help. Steven P. Ulrick
Somebody in the thread at some point said:
Hello, Everyone I hope that one of the many geniuses that frequent this list might be able to shed some light on a problem that I am having. I do run Fedora Core 6 (very happily, I must say :)) but this is too off topic, please feel free to contact me off list.
I have fully qualified domain: afolkey2.net. It can USUALLY be found thusly: http://www.afolkey2.net
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean: http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
I didn't see anything that made me think about DNS problems at all. What was the "problem with page loading"?
I would install and run mtr
yum install mtr
mtr www.afolkey2.net
and see what I could see.
-Andy
On Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:21:16 +0100 Andy Green andy@warmcat.com wrote:
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean: http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
I didn't see anything that made me think about DNS problems at all. What was the "problem with page loading"?
I would install and run mtr
yum install mtr
mtr www.afolkey2.net
and see what I could see.
Hello, Andy The problem had been that when I attempted to browse pages on my own website, on the same computer that I run the server on, most pages would never finish loading. For instance, on some pages in my Gallery2 installation, maybe one thumbnail would load, then the browser would just continue with the usual "Transferring data from www.afolkey2.net", "Waiting for www.afolkey2.net", "Read www.afolkey2.net" Then I found out that my brother Dave had no problems accessing the site from his computer. So that got me thinking....
Did a little searching on Google and I ended up changing /etc/hosts from: # Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
To: # Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 127.0.0.1 afolkey2.net www.afolkey2.net
This fixed my problem. This brings up another question. I don't remember what my /etc/hosts "USED" to look like before this issue started, but I know a few things: 1. I never had this problem until shortly before I started this thread. 2. I Did Not make any changes to /etc/hosts. No one else in our house, no one else at all, in fact, has root access to this machine.
All I know for sure is that everything works now.
Thank you for your attention. Steven P. Ulrick
P.S.: As an experiment, I commented out my addition to /etc/hosts and restarted my network and httpd. The result was that it went right back to not loading almost every page that I tried. I un-commented out my new additions, restarted the network and httpd, and then simply clicked refresh on the webbrowser that was still "trying" to load a page on my site. The result was that the page loaded as desired.
On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 21:08 -0500, Steven P. Ulrick wrote:
The problem had been that when I attempted to browse pages on my own website, on the same computer that I run the server on, most pages would never finish loading.
Before you added to your local loopback addresses, when you browsed your site were you browsing it via its IP address or a domain name?
And if you were using a domain name, what IP was associated with it at *that* time?
If you browse your server using an internal LAN address, whether that be 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.2, etc., the networking is handled internally by your computer. Barring some unusual firewall rules, that should work fine.
If you try browsing your server using an external address, your connections (logically) would go out of your network and back in again. That doesn't always work. Some systems will not allow internal LAN addresses to connect to external public ones. That's the sort of thing that some hackers will try (fake an internal address to get through your firewall). My firewall blocks those sorts of things, and my external address applies to my router rather than my PC. If I try to connect to my external address, from inside my LAN, I end up connecting to the webserver inside my router, that's used to configure it. It doesn't allow you to connect to the WAN side of things.
To confuse things even further, some systems will realise that the public address is applied to itself, and avoid actually going through the network, and just route things internally.
Whether you use a local DNS server, or your hosts file, the simplest way for internally testing a webserver is to have entries that tell your LAN your webserver domain name refers to an internal LAN address. However, this can confuse the Dickens out of scripts that update dynamic addresses with outside servers. I avoided that by running my server on a PC that I don't actually use directly, so it doesn't have confusing entries for its own domain name.
On Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:28:08 +0930 Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Hello, Tim
On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 21:08 -0500, Steven P. Ulrick wrote:
The problem had been that when I attempted to browse pages on my own website, on the same computer that I run the server on, most pages would never finish loading.
Before you added to your local loopback addresses, when you browsed your site were you browsing it via its IP address or a domain name?
With the domain name - http://www.afolkey2.net
And if you were using a domain name, what IP was associated with it at *that* time?
The same IP that I have now: 74.134.123.247
Steven P. Ulrick
Linus Ulrick wrote:
Hello, Everyone I hope that one of the many geniuses that frequent this list might be able to shed some light on a problem that I am having. I do run Fedora Core 6 (very happily, I must say :)) but this is too off topic, please feel free to contact me off list.
I have fully qualified domain: afolkey2.net. It can USUALLY be found thusly: http://www.afolkey2.net
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean: http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
<----------------[ SNIP ]------------------------>
I am not sure what your problem was, but I am not seeing it from here. Could something have been loading down the server? Possibly a cron job that puts a load on it, or a lot of web requests? (Your web logs should show if the later case is the problem.) If you are not trying to connect from the same location as the server, it could also be network problems that limit bandwidth on the connection to the server. (Backhoes can have a drastic affect on network speeds!) If this server hosts more then your own web pages, then you can also run into problems when another web site on the server is experiencing heavy traffic.
In any case, you will want to take a good look at the logs. Make sure there are not hardware problems, that you are not being subject to a denial of service attack, or a cracking attempt that is loading down the server. (Or worse, a successful cracking that has your server doing other things...)
Mikkel
On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 04:30 -0500, Linus Ulrick wrote:
Hello, Everyone I hope that one of the many geniuses that frequent this list might be able to shed some light on a problem that I am having. I do run Fedora Core 6 (very happily, I must say :)) but this is too off topic, please feel free to contact me off list.
I have fully qualified domain: afolkey2.net. It can USUALLY be found thusly: http://www.afolkey2.net
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean: http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
I use the free dynamic dns service from dnsexit.com. The nameservers that they have me point my domain to are as follows: ns1.dnsexit.com ns2.dnsexit.com
When I noticed the severe issues described above, I ran "ping" on each of those two servers. The edited results of "ping ns1.dnsexit.com" look something like this: PING ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=417 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=436 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=375 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=349 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=258 ms
--- ns1.dnsexit.com ping statistics --- 49 packets transmitted, 46 received, 6% packet loss, time 48033ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 91.901/433.380/827.993/223.834 ms
That didn't look very fair :), so I ran ping on that server again: PING ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=88.1 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=98.5 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=89.0 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=86.9 ms 64 bytes from ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=89.0 ms
--- ns1.dnsexit.com ping statistics --- 87 packets transmitted, 84 received, 3% packet loss, time 86027ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 85.584/91.493/108.933/4.825 ms
But, if I run "ping ns2.dnsexit.com" the results (again edited) look like this:
PING ns2.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=23.2 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=23.1 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=21.1 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=18.6 ms 64 bytes from nd188.dnsexit.com (64.182.102.188): icmp_seq=5 ttl=53 time=23.3 ms
--- ns2.dnsexit.com ping statistics --- 42 packets transmitted, 42 received, 0% packet loss, time 41040ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 18.630/25.121/40.702/4.839 ms
In this case, the times seem much quicker, and you will notice that unlike when I pinged ns1.dnsexit.com, there was no packet loss.
Check the list of packets and see if you have out of sequence or missing sequence numbers. If all that's missing are the last few (most likely with delays >25mS), what you're seeing is that hitting CTRL-C aborts the program before those last few packets are received.
Butyou will also notice that when I ran "ping ns2.dnsexit.com" that the server that appeared to be the one that was queried is "nd188.dnsexit.com", not "ns2.dnsexit.com"
That's an alias (CNAME). No big deal.
I don't know what (if any) the significance of that fact is. I merely observe it.
If nothing else, I THINK I can safely assume that they are having some issues on their end. Nonetheless, do any of you have any suggestions about free dynamic DNS services that you have had good fortune with?
Anyway, thank you in advance for any help that you may be able to give me.
Run several traceroutes to the DNS servers and the website in question. You may find an overlength route or possibly discover a flapping route with one of the ISPs. This is information their support groups will want to have.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer rstevens@internap.com - - CDN Systems, Internap, Inc. http://www.internap.com - - - - Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Andy Green -
Mikkel -
Rick Stevens -
Steven P. Ulrick -
Steven P. Ulrick -
Tim