On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 04:30 -0500, Linus Ulrick wrote:
I have fully qualified domain:
afolkey2.net. It can USUALLY be
found
thusly:
http://www.afolkey2.net
Tonight when I came home from work, I started seeing problems with
pages loading. Try the following to see what I mean:
http://www.afolkey2.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www.afolkey2.net
http://www.afolkey2.net/gallery2/main.php
The website didn't load, first go, here. But the stats page did. Very
odd. Both did eventually load, but both slowly. Though, since the
pages I had to look at were all "generated" things (stats and photo
galleries), that's not uncommon. Such things are often painfully slow,
in my experience.
It should be noted that making stats public can subject you to referrer
spam: Spammers linking to your pages, hoping to turn up in your stats,
and hoping that you publish your stats, or publish what refers to you in
some other way, so that you give them free advertising. You can get
deluged by them, and some quite unsavoury things, too.
I use the free dynamic dns service from
dnsexit.com. The
nameservers
that they have me point my domain to are as follows:
ns1.dnsexit.com
ns2.dnsexit.com
When I noticed the severe issues described above, I ran "ping" on each
of those two servers. The edited results of "ping ns1.dnsexit.com"
look something like this:
PING
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=417 ms
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=436 ms
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=375 ms
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=349 ms
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=258 ms
[tim@bigblack ~]$ ping
ns1.dnsexit.com
PING
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=227 ms
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=227 ms
64 bytes from
ns1.dnsexit.com (63.223.76.173): icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=226 ms
I got fairly consistent results for either name server, and fairly
similar ones for the webserver address:
[tim@bigblack ~]$ ping
afolkey2.net
PING
afolkey2.net (74.134.123.247) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from
74-134-123-247.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.134.123.247): icmp_seq=1 ttl=132
time=258 ms
64 bytes from
74-134-123-247.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.134.123.247): icmp_seq=2 ttl=132
time=257 ms
64 bytes from
74-134-123-247.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.134.123.247): icmp_seq=3 ttl=132
time=260 ms
It should also be noted that pinging a machine is quite a different
thing than using some other service on it. You can get good or bad ping
responses that are contrary to how their services respond. All a ping
test is how they respond to pings. :-\
I did a "dig" on your domain name, which is just looking up domain
records, the thing that you need to test, and got the following
response:
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig
www.afolkey2.net
; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>>
www.afolkey2.net
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 58276
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.afolkey2.net. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.afolkey2.net. 120 IN CNAME
afolkey2.net.
afolkey2.net. 120 IN A 74.134.123.247
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
afolkey2.net. 120 IN NS
ns1.dnsexit.com.
afolkey2.net. 120 IN NS
ns2.dnsexit.com.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.dnsexit.com. 172799 IN A 63.223.76.173
ns2.dnsexit.com. 172799 IN A 64.182.102.188
;; Query time: 890 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.2#53(192.168.1.2)
;; WHEN: Thu Aug 9 19:15:18 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 143
Which, while being about four times longer to complete (the query time)
than looking up some other domains I just tried (around 200 mS instead
of around 900 mS), is still not terribly slow. Certainly not as slow as
their webserver was to respond. So, I'd be more concerned about things
other than their DNS servers.
You probably also want to do some tests on the HTTP server response
time, but I don't have anything to tell you how to test that. That's
response time, more than download speed. People will put up with things
taking a little while to finish downloading, so long as they start
fairly promptly.
when I ran "ping ns2.dnsexit.com" that the server that
appeared to be
the one that was queried is "nd188.dnsexit.com", not
"ns2.dnsexit.com"
The same here, but forward and reverse name look ups don't have to match
(a fact often overlooked by some overzealous anti-spam people). It's
quite likely that whatever does their second name server does more than
just be a name server, and they might have named the device for that
purpose rather than just the name serving feature.
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short
ns1.dnsexit.com
63.223.76.173
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short -x 63.223.76.173
ns1.dnsexit.com.
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short
ns2.dnsexit.com
64.182.102.188
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig +short -x 64.182.102.188
nd188.dnsexit.com.
However, this is revealing (below). There's no A record (or any answer)
to trying to find out the IP for their second name server, by the other
domain name. That could well be a problem, it's just as well that's
their second name server, not the first one.
[tim@bigblack ~]$ dig
nd188.dnsexit.com
; <<>> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <<>>
nd188.dnsexit.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 50072
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;nd188.dnsexit.com. IN A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
dnsexit.com. 1195 IN SOA
ns2.dnsexit.com.
admin.netdorm.com.
2000060701 12000 2400 604800 1200
;; Query time: 15 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.2#53(192.168.1.2)
;; WHEN: Thu Aug 9 19:37:16 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 89
You might bring that to their attention, and ask them if they know why
things are running slowly at the moment.
If nothing else, I THINK I can safely assume that they are having
some
issues on their end. Nonetheless, do any of you have any suggestions
about free dynamic DNS services that you have had good fortune with?
I occasionally use
no-ip.com, which I see is slightly faster at
responding (667 mS). But then that's the speed between me and them, and
will be different between them and someone else. Likewise, with yours.
--
[tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386
Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7.
Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.