Hmmm, interesting....

I wasn’t online last night.  We were having a cold front passing through that was spawning storm after storm.

There was strange behaviour in my house, however.  Ha!  Wonder if they are related?

Comcast’s DNS server, the computer that converts domain names to IP addresses, (google.com translates to 216.239.57.99, f’rex) was down last night. 

I’m not internet wizard, but I *think* that the domain name server is used by other ISPs, and that Comcast uses other DNSs as well.  This would explain why internet connectivity was flakey overall.  Some Comcast customers were still able to connect, while other ISP users were not. 

Interestingly, during the early days of the internet, there was a faction that was against the use of domain name servers and domain names because of this sort of thing:  The *real* computers that hold content answer only to IP addresses, and DNSs convert names to those odd strings of numbers in order to get a response from the content servers.  If a DNS goes down, part of teh interweb is f*xxored. 

But you see, the good folks who set it up that way argued that people like you and me would never be able to remember strings of numbers like 216.239.57.99 instead of google.com. 

Never mind that we had been memorizing phone numbers of people for about one hundred years previously. 

Yes, there was a time before speed dial, and you knew that to reach grandma, you had to dial 408-424-9370. 

You’ll note that IP address (usually) contain 10 numerals, just like a long-distance call.  It’s also configured for easier memory--it’s easier to remember 4 sets of 2-3 numerals than it is to remember a phone numer and area code.

BTW, try putting in the the IP 216.239.57.99 into your browser’s URL field, and see what comes up, and how quickly it does. 

And that concludes Jean’s Internet History Moment!

BTW, I love the Image of the tree on your home page.  Where was that taken?

Yeah, we had that weirdness last night at home too. Although I wasn’t able to get into Gmail from about 3pm-10pm yesterday at all either. Definitely weird.

captcha: yorick

Heh

The whole DNS system is a fascinating concept of local and authoritative servers.  As Jean points out, eventually all DNS servers rely on two “master” servers called MAE-East and MAE-West (no joke), and when something happens to these centers it can seriously hinder the entire Internet.  This did actually happen once six or seven years ago and made getting around on the Internet very difficult for almost a week, but it was a much different world then and wasn’t quite as earth-shattering as it would be today.

Last night seems to have been strictly Comcast’s problem. It’s not clear to me if it was isolated to one particular area or was more widespread throughout the country.

The same thing happened here too. At first I thought it was a bad ethernet cable from the modem, because it was working, the TV cable was working and the off and on nature of the outage was confusing. I left it all until this morning and now everything is working OK.

Seems to be national.

Yes! ... I had problems last night too. I almost called my ISP, but my connection has been a little spotty for about a week now, and there’s a service call in, ... so I didn’t bother.

Holy cow, the IP address that Jean posted above snapped on the screen almost instantaneously. Imagine if all our pages appeared that fast.

Thanks Jean and Brian for the internet lesson. What a fascinating construct. I’ve generally thought of the internet as being composed of so many pieces that it would be nearly impossible to take it down completely. But last night seems to suggest otherwise. That’s an unsettling fact in this world.

But, if we had all known IP addresses and plugged those into the browser instead of the domain names, we would have been able to access the various websites?

Is there a reason why everyone couldn’t/shouldn’t make a bookmarkable IP address to their web sites available along with their domain name? Would that work with places like blogspot and typepad?

Brian, I’m assuming the outage was more widespread than localized. Margaret is out on the west coast, Jean, Jen and I are out here on the east coast, and Lynn is in Canada. I think I’ve run across a couple of people from Texas who also had problems.

Jean...the photograph was taken in Northumberland, England. It is a publicly available photograph from FreeFoto.com The photographer also has a number of other photographs of the same tree. But the number of other photos available for the price of a link back is in the hundreds. There are some really, really lovely photographs there.

OK, thought it was just me last night--interesting.  Came home around 9:30 and could not get online, shut computer down, restarted - all the usual, still nothing.  Then could get “sort of” there, but got messages from AOL saying I could access mail and some things, but internet connections (via comcast) were not able to complete or something weird like that.  Finally gave up and did something else.  Seems fine today.........when was the eclipse??

As far as I know, you can bookmark an IP URL.  In fact, you can even edit the entry to read the name of the site.

To convert a domain name to an IP address is easy.  There are lots of website out there that will do it for you.  If you want to be a geek about it, you can open a command line window and do a WHOIS command. 

You can find some interesting information about who owns the web servers the site is located on, and who owns the domain name. 

That’s how Gannon/Guckert got busted. 

whois.net is a good source.  BTW, many domain names are registered to several IP addresses.  Google, f’rex, has 4 IPs registered.  The reason is that if one of those IPs go down, the other three will take over.  That’s the good side to DNS servers. 

Thanks for the info on the tree!  That’s a gorgeous shot.  I love what you’ve done with your site!

I rarely see the actual site because I use NetNewsWire Lite to read articles.  Thanks for providing RSS and ATOM feeds! 

Jean.