Ok, you guys are way too techy for me!

Tracert? Huh?

Ping is the techy way of saying 'Hello other computer, are you listening?' In most cases, you will get a 'yes, I am' response back = something is working. (Some computers are told not to respond, so silence doesn't necessarily mean they are not working.)

Traceroute - AKA tracert for lazy typists or people whose systems couldn't cope with 'long' names until relatively recently - is a way of seeing what route the ping took from 'here' to 'there'. It will be several steps. Not everything en route will respond, but when something does, you know everything worked up to that point.

My aha moment a few minutes ago was to realise that I could ping you happily from the netbook, but not the main PC. The tracert showed it never left the PC. Hmm. Ah yes, the main PC has a program that takes a list of IP addresses (the equivalent of the telephone numbers the internet actually works with) from a variety of sources and blocks at least some contact with them. This is typically because they just serve ads / spam / nasties / something else you don't want..

.. and, yes, the IP address for your server is currently on at least one 'blocklist' from iblocklist.com.

Ghod knows why. It's often because someone else is hosting their site on the same IP and they're doing something naughty.

There are sites which allow you to enter an IP address - your site is at 67.220.228.223 - and see if they are on a particular blocklist and why.

But saying 'Oi, the IP for my site is on a blocklist' to your host is a good start. Then ask the person who is complaining if they're running peerguardian or similar.

One more question.  How concerned should I be?  Everyone I"ve asked on this side of the Atlantic can access my site, it seems to just affect U.K users (obviously not my largest market).

Tell me please whether I should be stressed or whether this is just a minor glitch.

Thanks again,
L.

I haven't set up any filters. I have my iMac, which is connected to a wireless router, which is connected to Virgin. There must be something along that line that's doing things I don't know about.

I can't access Lissa's site today either, so I'd say it's consistently down for me.

This is probably completely wrong but I'm having ongoing problems with my site (new one 'disappears' for some visitors so my url sends them to my old host with a broken version of my old site) and a genius client did some investigating for me - he found it to probably be a problem with caching. I'll just copy and paste a bit of his email as I barely understand it all:

Browsing your site on two different networks using two different DNS servers at the same time of day I saw content delivered from two different servers therefore DNS caching is the problem. From my home that uses Google's DNS pinging emily-escort.co.uk got me 69.65.3.130; this is the correct IP for your site and I see the correct HTML. From my iPhone on O2's EDGE/3G connection Safari got your old site and ping got me 195.249.40.82, which is for a Danish web hosting company http://www.teaminternet.dk/ I assume your old host? Switching my iPhone to my home wifi and thus using Google's DNS got me back to your correct site on 69.65.3.130.

What does this mean I suspect O2 is performing aggressive caching of the DNS. The DNS for your site was changed a while ago? So I suspect O2 is being overly aggressive or some of their servers have stale data and have a bug refreshing their cache. I would hope networks would only cache DNS for a day or two.

If anyone contacts you to say they cannot see your new site ask them to change their DNS to Google's DNS http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/ or Open DNS http://www.opendns.com/; both sites have docs on how to do this.

I hope none of those numbers are stupid to post on a forum. Er. And sorry again if this is nothing to do with the problem at hand! I just saw the bit about the site seeming to vanish when it wasn't actually down and was reminded of this email.

That was supposed to be:

www.newsreports.org

I don'tthink this is going to come up as a link, how do I set it as one?

Hi again,

I  contacted the administrator  of iblocklist and he told me it wasn't such a big deal to be on this list , that a small percentage of internet users subscribe to it.  So that's stopped the hyperventilating for now.

He also told me it's not worth switching ISPs over as whichever I moved to stood a "good chance" of being on the very same list!

Curiously, the site administrator of the escort directory never did tell me if he could access my site with any of the solutions I offered him BUT he did try to convince me to pay him to promote my site and be my webmaster?!?

Anika, were you ever able to access my site?

Thanks to everyone for all your input on this one.

L.

I might be stupid to ask, xw5, but what does this tell us?
 

 

I'm with Virgin Media, if by taking a look you mean literally doing that (and reporting) and not someone who Knows Stuff and can contribute more helpfully!