Forum down and email too

[leehack]

Hi

Just a quick question really. I have a strange occurrence which happens at least a couple of times a day. This forum becomes unreachable and also the email off my website is unreachable. I use Outlook Express and collect email from 3 addresses, 2 of them work fine and it is always my website email address that fails the instant that the Actinic forum does. FTPing to my website is also impossible.

I have a large horse "neigh" on my email so i know if i have a new message while im away from my desk. As soon as i hear the horse, i can guarantee 100% that the forum and my ftp is all fine again.

Has baffled me for sometime this one, anyone got any ideas?

[RuralWeb]

Is your horse on the same host as the forum??

[leehack]

That was the only common sense reason i could come up with too, but that seemed too logical and boring. The site is with fasthosts, so if this forum is somehow linked to that, my question would be answered i guess.

[I-CC]

The community forum is located in Reading I believe, which is not a location for fasthosts

Most logical reason will be down to how your ISP routes its connections and the peers being used on that route.

For example: Your machine request www, email or ftp for a certain address, ISPs DNS translates that to its IP address location and then a route of how to get there is decided upon and away the request toddles off. It is more than posibble that the best and fastest route for your email/ftp on 1 domain and the http on the community webside go via the same peering provider in say London, so it all gets routed via that location (possibly) and then dispersed from there, so possible for there to be a lag or an issue around that London peering location which could affect both - Possible.

Other reason is that all of your external connections go down, and the other email which continues to work is your ISP provided mail accounts, which continues to work. Think of ISP provided email as Local connections, i.e. you connect to the ISP and your connection on POP3 and SMTP stays within there network and is not ever connected across the Internet, but purely on there ISP local connection, whereas your web email and web access is out across the net... Just another possible reason...

[Mike Hughes]

I seem to remember actinic host with netbenefit so that's probably not the reason.

I would think it's more to do with network issues and possibly DNS caching at your isp.

Mike

Ah: I see technoweb beat me to it.

[chris ashdown]

Lee

I also use Fasthosts, Do you have load shareing set on your server

It may also be if you are using the low cost items on Fasthosts that there are to many people using the same server at one time as I expect their ratio's for the really cheap options are not very good

Is it a ms or Linux server

Have a word with Fasthosts support on 01452-541499 they are normally helpfull

[leehack]

Hi Guys

Many thanks for the replies.

Just to clarify a few things, on the 3 email addresses, one of them is my webmail for my website, one of them is my ISP account and the third is an old orange.net address which i use to register for things that might cause spam etc. The orange.net is pure webmail as they removed the service sometime ago and the only way you can retrieve is to use an existing account.

I have 2 websites of my own (websitedesigned.co.uk) is my main one and then i have (website-designed.co.uk) for building on and testing/learning etc.

websitedesigned.co.uk is hosted on a cheap package and it is the email retrieval on this account that fails. However, website-designed.co.uk is a developer package and the ftp up to this site fails at the same time. This is the pain as it is the main one i am ever working on.

Both are windows packages.

Cheers


Lee

[leehack]

I have just got off the phone to them and they say that my webmail server and the ftp servers are totally different locations and not linked. To me, when this event occurs, it is fasthosts exclusive, however that is not true as this forum goes unavailable too.

This leads me to believe that my ISP account is the problem, however that can be argued against as everything else is fine and i can access anything i like. Accessing this forum, ftping to my test site and collecting email from my main site are all linked in some way. There may be more things of course that i haven't happened to find yet, but at the moment it seems exclusive to these 2 things.

She asked me to send them some logs when this is happening, is it worth me doing this or am i wasting time you think?

[I-CC]

The community forum is definately not within a netbenefit location and is in reading, with the community hostname being directed to that location, so confirmed it is not fasthosts specific this.

I would definately look at this as routing glitches at some point within the path the traffic requests and receipt of data is taking from your location to the end location.

If they are asking you to do a traceroute, then they might be thinking the same thing, so if your connection dies, then you do a traceroute from your location to the www.domain-can-not-see.tld and it will show each router hop and from that they can then see where it dies.

It could very well be nothing to do with the ISP and is an Internet router out on the Net which is used as a primary peering point.

If it is a traceroute, then would benefit doing it when it occurs next to see if they can locate the block in the hops.