athenian200
Circumspect
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2010
Since I just had to do this with ZD just now, I thought I should tell others how to do it, because it's a very useful skill to have. Especially if your Internet is with Frontier like mine is, as they have really lousy default routing due to their inexperience with serving a wider area.
1. Check the website on a couple of many "Down for everyone or just me" sites with similar names. If it reports that the website is up, then you have a problem is somewhere between your end and the website's end. The website is not down.
2. Open a command prompt window using CMD on Windows, or a terminal program like XTerm on Linux/Unix.
3. Confirm that the problem exists at the routing level by using the ping command. If you get 100% packet loss and no replies, then it's definitely a routing problem. If you see something else appear here, your access issues may be related to something else.
4. Once you've confirmed that the website is not down, and that none of the packets are making it through, use the tracert command on Windows (or traceroute on Linux/Unix).
Here's an example of me doing this for ZD just a few minutes ago:
In this case, you can see that the problem was lag-102.ear3.Dallas1.Level3.net, as that's where it timed out. That means that one of Level 3 routing server is having issues. I know that Frontier uses Level 3 because that company reached out to them and offered them services because they were causing problems routing half of Dallas's Internet traffic through Chicago before. Anyway, traceroute simply tries to find another way around to the desired address. In this case, taking a different branch through Cogent's servers that are also at Level 3. Surprisingly, systems don't always do this by default, especially if the route was just working a few moments ago. Sometimes, it has to be forced.
It's worth noting that there is pretty much nothing a website can do about this. It's all up to the ISPs and Tier-1 Internet backbone providers, and peering agreements that are largely outside of everyone's control. But they do sometimes have issues. The route this generates isn't always the most efficient, but it's better than nothing.
1. Check the website on a couple of many "Down for everyone or just me" sites with similar names. If it reports that the website is up, then you have a problem is somewhere between your end and the website's end. The website is not down.
2. Open a command prompt window using CMD on Windows, or a terminal program like XTerm on Linux/Unix.
3. Confirm that the problem exists at the routing level by using the ping command. If you get 100% packet loss and no replies, then it's definitely a routing problem. If you see something else appear here, your access issues may be related to something else.
4. Once you've confirmed that the website is not down, and that none of the packets are making it through, use the tracert command on Windows (or traceroute on Linux/Unix).
Here's an example of me doing this for ZD just a few minutes ago:
In this case, you can see that the problem was lag-102.ear3.Dallas1.Level3.net, as that's where it timed out. That means that one of Level 3 routing server is having issues. I know that Frontier uses Level 3 because that company reached out to them and offered them services because they were causing problems routing half of Dallas's Internet traffic through Chicago before. Anyway, traceroute simply tries to find another way around to the desired address. In this case, taking a different branch through Cogent's servers that are also at Level 3. Surprisingly, systems don't always do this by default, especially if the route was just working a few moments ago. Sometimes, it has to be forced.
It's worth noting that there is pretty much nothing a website can do about this. It's all up to the ISPs and Tier-1 Internet backbone providers, and peering agreements that are largely outside of everyone's control. But they do sometimes have issues. The route this generates isn't always the most efficient, but it's better than nothing.
