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Results for: dns for eastern telecom

July 13, 2006

Triple-check if your site is really down.

Been spending all the on the phone explaining to a client and their ISP (Eastern Telecoms) that their site is actually up and not the other way around which is what the ISP is claiming. The client is a bank so there wasn’t anyone in their department with whom I can discuss this in a more technical manner so I had to come up with some solid proof their ISP cannot deny.

So here’s my triple-treat. A three step process to verify if your site is really up or not:

Step 1. DNS Check

This website is one of my most often used tool in checking for a site’s health. A lot of the problems can be easily diagnosed and resolved using DNSReport. To check for your site, just go to www.dnsreport.com and type in your domain (in the format “domain.com” only). A clean bill of health will show all fields in white (sometimes yellow). If there’s a problem, you’d get Error results, red text reports and incomplete page load. See sample here.

Step 2. Ping & Traceroute Results

For international originating IP, I use DNSStuff. For local IP, I use GlobeQuest Utilities (ok, this one becomes useless if the problematic ISP is Globe itself). Ping results will show you a response from your server’s IP. If your site is down or unreachable, it will display a “no reply from …” result. See sample ping results here and traceroute here.

Step 3. Web Proxies

If you can’t convince someone using the 2 tools above, then web proxies like The Cloak will surely do. The Cloak is a free anonymous web surfing proxy and it’s a good tool to check on a site from a remote location (read: IP). If you get a “Page cannot be found” from your PC, try using The Cloak and it might just give you the actual site if it’s really online. See sample URL here.

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Telecoms
July 12, 2006

Fix your ISP DNS Problems

It has been a constant problem not only for me but for a lot of people as well. There are times when I get reports that people cannot see any of my blogs or some other people’s sites I host. Yet, the server is up, there is no problem on the data center and the affected sites load fine from other locations or other ISPs.

Almost all local ISPs have this problem — poor DNS architecture, network congestion, or inadequate peering arrangements — PLDT (esp. Smart Wifi), Eastern Telecoms, Globe Quest (Innove), and GreenDot.

What I usually suggest to people is to reset their modem and reboot. If you’re on a corporate account, it’s also effective to call the ISP’s tech support and ask them to hook you to a different/better DNS server. I do get a lot of arguments with their tech guys thru email exchanges and even if they fixed the problem, they wouldn’t admit the issue originated from their end.

I end up using other tools to show the clients that their site is running fine — free proxy servers, remote ping/traceroute tools, anonymous web proxies.

Then, here comes OpenDNS:

OpenDNS Two things make OpenDNS faster than similar services. First, Open DNS runs a really big, smart cache, so every OpenDNS user benefits from the activities of the broader OpenDNS user base. Second, OpenDNS runs a high-performance network which is geographically distributed (see network map) and serviced by several redundant connections. OpenDNS responds to your query from the nearest location. That means we’re very fast (and extremely reliable, to boot).

Instead of using your default DNS settings, you can use OpenDNS instead. Been using it for a couple of days now and seemed to work fine and somewhat faster.

Here are instructions on how to use it with your PC (if you connect directly to the net) or configuring your routers (e.g. Linksys). Try it and see if you’re still having problems with not being able to view certain sites. Hopefully, it does solve the problem.

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Telecoms
July 08, 2005

Heavy traffic overloads Inq7.net

Starting early today, the website of Inq7.net has been suffering from heavy traffic and has resorted to a low-graphics version of their website. This is no surprise considering the recent issues plaguing the nation concerning the Gloriagate fiasco.

I did some quick research of my own on how Inq7.net is set up. So far, what is widely known is that their site is hosted by Bitstop (video streams are coming from Bitstop, no doubt.). I check their DNS servers and gave me 3 IPs, the primary DNS from a US (Mountain View, California but the IP is registered to Inq7.net) and the other two is Philippine based, owned by PLDT and Eastern Telecoms.

I have no idea how many servers are clustered to deliver content but I heard that they were not using any database servers for content delivery because of the risks it entails. With running a DB, when something crashes it or it chokes, content delivery is halted on all levels. By using flat files, they can still seperate the archives from the recent news and be able to serve them up quite efficiently. They’ll only have to worry about the webserver (they run Apache/1.3.31 with PHP/4.3.8) instead of both. These server/s host 5 sites — Inq7.net, Inq7.com, Inqseven.com, Inquirer.net and Inq7money.net.

With over 1 million unique visitors and 30 million web pages served a month, I am sure they have made some sort of server clustering or load balancing to be able to opmitize their site.

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The Internet