[SOLVED] Forums very often unreachable

[Aquous]

Hi,

For the most part of the day, when trying to access the forums, my browser (Google Chrome) gives the following error message:

[John R. Graham]

I'm not currently seeing any connectivity issues.

- John
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This space intentionally left blank.

[LoTeK]

From my home network (which is generally not very reliable and therefore not that meaningful) and from network at work I can connect to the forums but loading any page is mostly very slow although google/youtube etc are not slow, and if I post something I have to wait up to 30 seconds until I receive the affirmation that my post was entered.
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"I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language!"

[Aquous]

Guess the problem is on my end then
The problem is that only for forums.gentoo.org, about 80% of the times I try I can't resolve the DNS. Pinging doesn't work either. Any other site works fine, including other *.gentoo.org sites.

I'm gonna try mucking around in the router settings a bit. This is going to be a ***** to debug...

[BoneKracker]

Before you go screwing around with your router, read this.

I recently discovered that, often, the DNS servers provided by my ISP have no record of gentoo.org. Why that is I can't tell you, but I confirmed it by manually doing nameserver queries over the course of several days.

I found this out because I suddenly started having name resolution errors when trying to connect to the forums. What was actually happening was that my alternate DNS servers (opendns and googledns, which I specify in my dhcp client configuration be appended to those named by my ISP's dhcp server) were no longer present in my resolv.conf. This in turn was happening because my dhcp client wasn't actually being invoked, and a default (i.e., unconfigured) udhcp instance was being used instead. That, in turn, was caused by either:

a) the default busybox configuration changing to include udhcp; or

b) openrc changing to prefer udhcp over dhclient if no module is specified in /etc/conf.d/net

To fix this in my case I simply added a modules entry to my /etc/conf.d/net file, which cased my configured dhcp client to be used, which resulted in my alternate dns servers being added to my resolv.conf (actually, they were added to the resolv.conf file used by my local caching nameserver), which resulted in not having any problems connecting to gentoo.org URLs.

So, I suggest trying a manual 'dnslookup gentoo.org <ip address of your dns server>' to test if your dns server actually has gentoo.org records or not. And, if you're finding that gentoo.org address is not available (occasionally, frequently, always), a work-around would be to add some other dns server (preferably operated by a different organization) to your list of dns servers.

If this is a widespread problem, maybe one of the admins should look into it and ask gentoo's domain name registrar or hosting provider what's going on.
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Oldthinkers unbellyfeel INGSOC.
-- Headline of a document on Winston Smith's terminal in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, seen briefly in the background in one scene of the movie rendition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[666threesixes666]

as root add to the bottom of /etc/hosts

89.16.167.134 gentoo.org

static gentoo resolve, dont pester your dns server then.
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Satan compels thee

[BoneKracker]

[666threesixes666]

im not sure if thats functioning correctly.... so i fixed up a far superior solution... in a 1-2-3-4-5 BAM format...

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/BIND#Easy_Caching_DNS

this will cache <foo>.gentoo.org locally

instead of hitting googles dns 150,000,000 times a day, bind will pull it once or twice, then u hit bind 150,000,000 times a day... same deal for foo.gentoo.org
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Satan compels thee

[BoneKracker]

Not if there's no record for the URL on your upstream dns server to begin with, it won't.
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Oldthinkers unbellyfeel INGSOC.
-- Headline of a document on Winston Smith's terminal in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, seen briefly in the background in one scene of the movie rendition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[666threesixes666]

it uses 8.8.8.8 and usurps power from your upstream dns server, unless you add it to the bind configs.... bind uses 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4... googles dns's you could skip bind entirely and throw your dns out the window and use 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4 instead. this actually resolved some issues that were on my back boiler.
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Satan compels thee

[Aquous]

The stuff posted here seems quite advanced, so I'll need some time to do the necessary reading, but I can say this:

[666threesixes666]

204.187.15.12 forums.gentoo.org

though im not sure it will work correctly.... instead

[BoneKracker]

[BoneKracker]

[666threesixes666]

yup i tested reboot and realized that i edited a file thats dynamically generated, and didnt know if networkmanager was doing it or not because i have manual dns and manual ip.

mkultra@mksrv [ ~ ]$ cat /etc/conf.d/net
#Generated by NetworkManager


8.8.8.8 will resolve gentoo and the forums, idk id take function over speed.

aparently deleting resolv.conf will default to localhost resolution. thx for pointing @ /etc/conf.d/net

im gonna work on the wiki bind stuff
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Satan compels thee

[BoneKracker]

You might want to look into dnsmasq and openresolv.
_________________
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel INGSOC.
-- Headline of a document on Winston Smith's terminal in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, seen briefly in the background in one scene of the movie rendition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[666threesixes666]

your the one with the resolv problems to forums.gentoo.org or gentoo.org

[BoneKracker]

_________________
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel INGSOC.
-- Headline of a document on Winston Smith's terminal in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, seen briefly in the background in one scene of the movie rendition of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[Aquous]

OK, I tried screwing around with my router settings and came up empty. bind/dnsmasq were too complicated for me, and also don't exist for Windows/Android AFAIK, which I both use, so I just added an entry to my hosts files and the site works just fine now

[666threesixes666]

for windows
http://www.reaper-x.com/2008/07/10/set-up-caching-nameserver-on-windows-using-bind/

for android
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=627118

to see and find more for your self....

google (android or windows or linux or osx or your router model) caching name server

searching "windows caching nameserver" & "android caching nameserver" on google found those links posted (sorry if im not supposed to link external sites here)

please post your host entry to confirm what host entry works, then edit post no.1 of the thread and add "solved" to the title
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Satan compels thee

[derk]

you can use

/etc/resolv.conf.head and /etc/resolv.conf.tail to add dns info namerserver info and search domains etc permenantly to your resolv.conf file under openrc with any dhcp service I believe .. I know it works with dhcpcd

[BoneKracker]