kMarple wrote on our boards:
"MonkeyLover" said: I'm just finding it extremely odd that people in very different geographic locations using a variety of different machines (running different OSs I'm sure) are having troubles at the same time. Seems very strange to me.
NOTE: Explanation below is a bit technical, even with some details left out, so you can feel free to skip the first 4 paragraphs if you just want an answer to "how do I fix it?".
It isn't that uncommon. The DNS system is basically a worldwide network organized in a hierarchy (a tree, if you're familiar with the computer science version). If your computer wants to access a website it doesn't have information cached for, or if its info is out of date, it asks its DNS server for the information. If that DNS server doesn't have it, it forwards the request, and so on until it reaches a server that has the info. The information is then passed back the way it came, and each server that forwarded the request caches it, at least temporarily.
The problem arises when a server has bad information and thinks it knows how to access the site, but doesn't. It forwards this bad data in response to requests, so soon many DNS servers can be using the bad information. There are many ways a server can get the bad information in the first place, but it's a known, serious problem with DNS. There have actually been attacks based on getting a DNS server to send people to a malicious site instead of the real one. Not a concern in this case, since it sounds like the site is just not showing up rather than redirecting to another one.
Since DNS records expire after a period of time the problem usually works itself out eventually. The record expires, the next request gets forwarded, and hopefully comes back with the correct information. The "time to live" (ttl) can be anywhere from seconds to weeks, though.
The advantage of OpenDNS and other public DNS services like Google's (which I use myself) is that they tend to have more authoritative records, and are less likely to give you bad information. This also increases security, since bad information can mean more than just not loading the page you asked for. In many cases, they're also faster, since they're more likely to have information that your default DNS server would have to send off for.
Solution-wise then, the best option would be to switch to more reliable DNS servers, like the OpenDNS servers Amberwolf recommended or Google's (http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/). If that isn't an option, the problem ought to work itself out on its own, but there's no telling exactly how long it could take. Could be tomorrow, could be 2 weeks from now.
There is one other thing anyone having trouble could try, and that's clear the DNS cache on the PC that's having problems. This causes it to request the information from its DNS server again instead of using what it has stored. It may or may not work, depending on whether or not the server it asks is still using the bad information. If you're on a Windows machine, you'd open a command prompt and run
Other OSes / systems should also have some way of doing it, but that one will work on any version of Windows (at least Windows 2000 or better). You'll most likely need Admin rights on the machine to run it.
UPDATE: Several online DNS lookup tools also fail to resolve themanime.org. The ones that do return the IP address [url=http://69.73.181.154/]69.73.181.154, which seems to be correct. Using it directly just brings up a cPanel page rather than the site, which is typical for shared webhosting servers. For debugging though, you might try using that IP directly just to see if it loads at all. If you get the cPanel page, it's most likely a DNS issue. If you can't access it at all, it could be something else.
UPDATE 2: The "whois" record for themanime.org also shows different nameservers (NS1.ALETIA.COM and NS2.ALETIA.COM) than show up in a DNS lookup (ns.nocdirect.com and ns2.nocdirect.com). Aletia.com and the two nameservers from it redirect to a generic domain parking site, so if the site changed hosting services recently (or the hosting service changed hands) the records may be out of date. |