Muck Connection Problems tonight?

[Dusk]

Anyone else having trouble getting onto the muck? I can sometimes connect, and sometimes get partly in, but it's very very slow, and disconnects me right away. And I've tried from more than one connection. :-P

[Derpy]

It's not just you. The MUCK seems to be down again...or very nearly down. An intermediate server may be the culprit! HostBrony has been notified. Last time it was back within a day, so let's cross our...hooves.

[Dusk]

Yeah, bad timing for me. Finally my day off (Friday) so can stay up late tonight and get extra time on tomorrow, and can't even get on.

Doing a traceroute, it does look like there are some bad networking issues somewhere.

[Dusk]

Looks like we're back! Just in time for me to go to bed.

[Firefly]

I am still having the 'no host found' issue using the alpha 'equestria.kaitain.org' address. If I get the numeric it hits instantly every time.

I can ping kaitain.org but only without 'equestria' on it. Add that and it's not findable.

It usually takes between 70+ attempts before I get in, but even then I can not ping the full addy.

Luckily, since the numeric changes to often to be usable for long, I found a workaround. By swapping the addy's first letter, the "E" in "Equestria" between upper and lower case, it'll hit almost every time on the 3rd try, but only if I let fail with the other case.

Basically, "Equestria.kaitain.org" has to attempt and fail, then I swap to "equestria.kaitain.org" and let it fail, then swapping back to "Equestria.kaitain.org" gets in. Sometimes it takes one more attempt using the lower case 'e', but it lets me in!

Still can not ping the full addy even when connected to the Muck. This happens to me on 4 different computers, on 3 different operating systems, and my work computer.

So long as the workaround is working, I'm happy though. Beats sitting for an hour+ just to log on.

A static numeric like the other mucks would be nice too.

[Spike]

Short answer: Your ISP's DNS server may be misconfigured. Workarounds:

• Change your DNS settings to use OpenDNS instead. Instructions are here: 208.69.38.205/
  
• Instead of going to equestria.kaitain.org, try landsraad.wolfcat.org.
  

Technical details:

I have two connections available to me (my home one, and a remote-hosted server) and one of them fails to look up EQM's address.

On the working connection, if I use 'dig' (a DNS lookup tool) to look up equestria.kaitain.org, I get this:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
equestria.kaitain.org.	14341	IN	CNAME	landsraad.wolfcat.org.
landsraad.wolfcat.org.	1	IN	A	2.97.84.1

This is perfectly OK; it says that equestria.kaitain.org points to landsraad.wolfcat.org; the server then does a lookup on landsraad.wolfcat.org and gets the IP. CNAME records are like "see also" entries for DNS -- they say that one name is just a nickname for another.

On the non-working connection, I get:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
equestria.kaitain.org.	7200	IN	CNAME	landsraad.wolfcat.org.

For some reason the DNS server doesn't carry through and resolve the CNAME entry to an actual IP.

I suspect what's tripping up the broken server is that the second lookup is in a different domain, so it has to start the lookup over, going to a second server; when I try CNAMEs that resolve inside the same domain, it works.

[Dusk]

I'd wager you're probably right on that, Spike. My client falls back to cached ip addresses on failures, but I'll also start paying attention and see if my server is having any problems with it or not.

And I wonder if the standard allows CNAMEs across domains or not, but too tired to look. :-)

[Spike]

Jan 26, 2012 7:19:36 GMT -5 Dusk said:

And I wonder if the standard allows CNAMEs across domains or not, but too tired to look. :-)

I think it's legal. The only restrictions I recall are a CNAME record can't have the same name as any other record (so, for example, no MX records), and CNAMEs aren't supposed to be used for mail servers. Pointing a CNAME at another CNAME is legal but discouraged for efficiency reasons.

It's pretty clear that what's happening in the broken case is the server is looking up equestria.kaitain.org, getting landsraad.wolfcat.org, then trying to look up the latter address ON THE SAME SERVER and getting NXDOMAIN (no such domain), at which point it gives up and returns that to the client. This is pretty clearly incorrect behavior; it should be figuring out what the authoritative servers are for wolfcat.org and going there. I haven't filed a ticket with my ISP yet, but maybe I should; it would be interesting to see what their response is.