Thread: Reports of downtime

For some reason, parts of the site are going down at random for random people in random places. There seems to be no pattern to the places or portions of the site unavailable.

It may have something to do with the SQL; we're working on isolating and solving the problem. Please bear with us while we figure it out.

Thanks,
-evkl

looks more like DNS issues as some DNS is reporting NXDOMAIN:

C:\Documents and Settings\PPN>dig bmgf.bulbagarden.net

; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> bmgf.bulbagarden.net
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 1575
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;bmgf.bulbagarden.net. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
bulbagarden.net. 900 IN SOA ns1.softlayer.com. root.bulbagarden.net. 2009011504
3600 300 604800 3600

;; Query time: 140 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.2.1#53(192.168.2.1)
;; WHEN: Thu Jan 15 13:54:07 2009
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 96

When I heard of rolling errors, I had a feeling it might have been DNS. We'll take a deeper look into it.

Just to confirm, people who've been unable to access parts have been able to access them again later, right?

PPN's advice helped me.

Still, this is going to freak out a lot of people.

I couldn't access the forums a little while ago, obviously I can now.

I was unable to access both BMGf and Bulbanews for most of this afternoon PST (I didn't try Bulbapedia). Even when the bulbagarden.net gateway site was up, the forums were not.

Welcome to the redesigned Bulbagarden Forums!

One of our users found a temp solution to this DNS issue.

I am unable to access Bulbanews right now. (I don't have Windows, so I can't use the above solution.)

Will this ever fix, or will Bulbagarden just be permanently inaccessible for some users?

I have some friends who still can't get on and don't want to mess with the system files to fix it. They'll eventually be able to access it, right?

It'll take about a day to fix, from the start of the problem. Everyone should be okay by this evening, tomorrow morning at the latest.

Okay.

Thanks Ev. I'm probably panicking more than I should about this.

It could be because of these weather problems throughout the US, the low-high temps could be messing up the system. Also, I've been putting up warnings on the BN frontpage, so when I can access it again I will put up a link to this page, saying that they are periodical outages.

It isn't a weather problem...apparently our hosting company is moving us around, or something, but long story short it's causing some computers to go to a place where Bulbagarden is, and other computers go to a place where Bulbagarden isn't. The big computers that point our home computers on where to go--the DNS servers--update about once a day with correct information. The problem started around this time yesterday, so it should be fixed around this time today.

Actually this isn't a Windows-only workaround.
I am not very used to Linux as I've only used it in school, but to my knowledge the file should be /etc/hosts there with basically the same syntax.

Checking the Wikipedia article for the hosts file actually reveals that pretty much any system that people here might use should have this file:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file#Location_and_default_content

Out of curiosity, is there a reason the forums are STILL down? This is getting annoying to more than a few people (the unusual downtime) and not everyone wants to change system files/knows how. I'm afraid if this continues much longer people will migrate to other forums and "Project Overgrow" will be responsible for BMGf's death.

I really think you've screwed this up bigtime. Just saying.