Site not accessible - us or them?

[paulC]

Recently I've had a few complaints from people trying to access our site that they get "cannot connect" or "page does not exist" errors. Is there any easy way to tell whether the problem is on their end or our end??

[sdjl]

Ask them to see if they can view a different site on your server/account.
You could always ask them to do a tracert for you and have a look at the result of that.
It may be worth finding out who their ISP is and see if you can dig out any talk of problems.

David

[paulC]

Ask them to see if they can view a different site on your server/account.

I would, but there's only the one site up right now.

You could always ask them to do a tracert for you and have a look at the result of that.

Any simple way to do this? They're not particularly computer-savvy users. Would a traceroute from a web site like http://www.dnsstuff.com/ be any use?

It may be worth finding out who their ISP is and see if you can dig out any talk of problems.

One of the people is connecting from their work and has no idea what the ISP is, so it's difficult to tell if the problem is across a few ISPs or not...

[sdjl]

You could ask them to try accessing http://cpanel**.gzo.com - Replace ** with your server number.
I know it's not the most beautiful look, but it's another site on the server

dnsstuff does a traceroute from its own server, not your clients location.
If you explain in simple layman terms of how to do a tracert and get the results to you, it should be relatively simple for them to do.

1) Click Start then click run.
2) type cmd and then hit enter in the Run box
3) In the now opened command prompt window type: tracert YOURDOMAIN.com (replace YOURDOMAIN with the domain in question)
4) Once the command prompt window clealy says "trace complete" right click anywhere in that window and choose "Select all"
5) Now press enter
6) Open word or another similar text editing program
7) Go to the Edit menu
8) Click paste
9) Save the text file and attach it to an email directed to me

That should get you started.

If you can manage to get a tracert from them, you should be able to gauge who their ISP is.

David

[Amitabh]

A simple modification would make it slightly easier

1) Click Start then click run.

2) Type "cmd" and then hit enter in the Run box

3) In the now opened command prompt window type:
tracert YOURDOMAIN.com > c:\tracert.txt
(replace YOURDOMAIN with the domain in question)

4) Once the command has finished executing( remember, there won't be any output in the command prompt), ask the client to send the "tracert.txt" file located in"c:\" to you via mail.


David

[sdjl]

There's always that option too

[paulC]

Got it. I don't use Windows, so didn't get the tracert reference at first. Thanks for the advice, this should help get us sorted out

[Frank Hagan]

Another option is for them to set up a free monitoring service from http://www.easymonitor.com or http://www.siteprobe.com That will show them if the domain is accessible from NY or London.

Another factor is their company firewall and caching of the DNS information. My company uses an IP-based caching system that causes all of the domains on a server to be returned as the first domain accessed on that server (in effect, it is ignoring the named portion of the name server).

This can happen at home too, but there's an easy solution. In that same command window, they can issue ipconfig /flushdns to clear the DNS cache on their machines (it has no effect on our caching at work unless done by our IT department).