Well, a lot when some nasty hacks over the last week or so on DNS servers are keeping people from getting name resolution to IP addresses. Which starts making things intermittently accessible, and (possibly) leads to Comcast having nationwide broadband problems with their DNS services (according to their tech support people). Which means that getting to an actual website has been horribly flaky for us at home this evening (though, if we knew all the actual IP addresses, we’d be golden).
Bleah.
I was having a similar problem tonight…..your post explains quite a lot.
This set of problems has been plaguing CoH players (see the forums), and at least another person notes it’s (for him, tonight) a Comcast DNS problem. A comment there quotes SANS:
We have received a couple of inquiries regarding the unavailablity of Comcast. Apparently Comcast is experiencing problems nationwide due to an equipment update. This does not appear to have any connection to the DNS Cache Poisoning that we have been following over the last few days.
The Comcast technical problems should be resolved shortly and all will return to normal.
Next time I’ll try manually forcing a different DNS server (like one of the ones mentioned here).
Yes…my web email service has been off line since yesterday afternoon as well.
Very annoying.
The irony is that, most likely, the service was still on, but your ability to get to it (unless you knew the IP address) was wonked out. Sort of like having a phone book with half the pages ripped out; the folks all have phone numbers, but you have no way of determining them.
You canna ping them to determine their IPs?
Hmmm. An interesting thought, that.
But … if DNS is wonky, could you ping them? How would the ping name be resolved? And if you could ping them, then other web services would be available, nu?
More info:
As reported by CNET, Comcast, the largest provider of broadband Internet access with 6.5 million customers, suffered a general outage Thursday evening.
At 5:32 EDT, the company’s help page on its Web site had a notice that “connection to the Internet is currently unavailable. Our technicians are aware of the situation and are working to resolve the issue.” It was not clear whether all customers were affected or if the outage was regional, although the notice was posted under “general outage.”
About an hour later, a notice was posted stating that the outage was resolved. And about three hours later, the company posted a message stating that “scheduled maintenance” had been completed.
They may *say* the “outage was resolved” by 6:32p EDT, but it was still going strong a couple hours later in MDT.
And another long thread (with fixes) here.