The Internet is a strange place sometimes. So much electronic stuff all hooked together in a system that covers the world. It is really a wonder it all works as well as it does.
Well today it didn’t work all that well for about an hour for me. I was playing with Ubuntu Linux on my “Playground” computer. Suddenly my web sites were gone and what seemed like all my website URLs were taking me to some strange financial website. I tried 3 or 4 of my web sites (I have 11) and they all pointed to the same financial site.
Was Linux pulling a trick on me? I jumped over to my WIN7 computer and it was the same story. What the hey?
I found out it wasn’t all my sites but all the sites that shared a single IP address with multiple URL’s. That was 9 of my sites. It was now obvious to me that there was a failure in the Name Server. That’s the computer machine that figures out from the URL (the name) what IP (the number) to route the connection.
I quickly fire off a service ticket to my provider to get the problem fixed pronto. I have 9 web sites that are not working.
In the mean time (the time spent waiting) I explored using a different set of name servers than the ones provided by my web site provider. I keep my domain registrations with a different service than my web site provider. That is so I can easily make a move if I must. (All eggs not in one basket sort of thing.)
I actually moved one of my URL’s to the new name servers and figured out all the programming required. It was not quite or actualy anywhere close to an automatic process. But now that I know the ropes it won’t be so hard to do it again if I must.
The old name server was fixed by my site provider in about an hour and a half. Everything is working normal again. Like I said, it is wondrous that the system holds up as well as it does. There are a lot of cyber-maniacs out there trying to break things. My service does pretty good considering.
I was watching one of the Jason Bourne TV movies last night and had to just laugh about how well all their electronic gizmo’s worked all the time…