Sorry, I was mixing you up with im1

However, if you do a simple tracert I expect your TT DNS Servers give it the correct target address. The route then gets blocked when it gets near there.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 22-May-17 12:52:08)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

if you do a simple tracert I expect your TT DNS Servers give it the correct target address.

Nope:

$ traceroute greece.org
traceroute: unknown host greece.org

What OS are you running? It doesn't look like Windows,

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

What OS are you running?

MacOS, but if you want it from Windows:

C:\Users\andy>tracert greece.org
Unable to resolve target system name greece.org.

C:\Users\Bob>tracert greece.org

Tracing route to greece.org [64.118.198.21]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.254
2 23 ms 20 ms 30 ms b.gormless.thn.aa.net.uk [90.155.53.52]
3 ^C
C:\Users\Bob>

Ummm! The website is now working using the URL, or!!!

If I enter greece.org into the IE11 URL bar I get this page, the valid site Home Page. But if I enter www.greece.org I get:-

Can’t reach this page

•Make sure the web address http://www.greece.org is correct

That is weird.

Now neither method works.

I wonder if the whole site is running on something like a single office PC or small inhouse Apache server? Not a proper commercial server, and just can't cope? The first link above just worked again when it didn't at the point I wrote the previous short sentence paragraph.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 22-May-17 16:59:37)

One of the nameservers is still dead, which will undoubtedly cause problems. Other issues may exist too of course.

nslookup -type=ns greece.org d0.org.afilias-nst.org

Server: UnKnown
Address: 2001:500:f::1

greece.org nameserver = ns1.sysnet.net
greece.org nameserver = ns2.sysnet.net

nslookup www.greece.org ns2.sysnet.net

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
Server: UnKnown
Address: 64.118.200.3

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to UnKnown timed-out

I have just connected to Hellenic Electronic Center (www.greece.org) at 00.30 23 May with a BT Consumer connection using both Google's DNS servers and the default BT servers.

Plain traceroutes will often get blocked by overzealous (or just plain cautious) admins; im1 was correct, a traceroute emulating an http connection to the webserver works fine.

I have a feeling the issue is indeed with DNS, but not the end-users' DNS so robertos is absolutely correct, it probably doesn't really matter what local DNS server you're using. I imagine some cache for longer than others and expire at different times, hence why it sometimes works from some ISPs but not others.

If you have the permissions and credentials to do so, you could opt for a third party DNS provider for those domains (such as Hurricane Electric or ClouDNS); you could do it for free, and be far more confident that an authoritative DNS server is always available. I switched my domains' DNS servers from the original registrar's ones to one of those two, and have had no issues with either.

You could also try one of the many website availability monitors (plenty of limited but free options) and set it up to monitor the actual IP address on port 80, at least that way you'll know if the webserver becomes unavailable or if it's just a DNS issue.

Edited by sergiup (Tue 23-May-17 11:53:22)