Okay, so this might border on being a rant, but it’s more like musings. Late last night I noticed I couldn’t get any access to my site www.rogerdavies.eu or roger-davies.net. But what I found puzzling was that other people kept telling me they could access my site fine. So it was something about my connection to the site?

I contacted by my ISP (Virgin) & hosting company both of whom told me it was nothing to do with them. (Clearly it was something to do with ONE of them!)

I was getting frustrated. Pinging the server just returned a timeout error. Usually just a sign that no meaningful response came in any reasonable amount of time. BUT, my friends were telling me they could access it fine. Using a proxy I could access my own site. “Curiouser and curiouser”, remarked Alice. Sleuthing further, I reset my modem, hooked my computer directly into it (by-passing our LAN, router and any firewall complications) and tried doing a trace route, which reavealed something odd:

C:\Documents and Settings\Roger>tracert www.rogerdavies.eu Tracing route to www.rogerdavies.eu [82.165.217.36] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 5 ms 7 ms 4 ms 10.92.156.1 2 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms bagu-t2cam1-a-v133.network.virginmedia.net [80.5.163.129] 3 6 ms 5 ms 19 ms bagu-t3core-1a-ae2-0.network.virginmedia.net [195.182.180.5] 4 5 ms 7 ms 11 ms man-bb-a-so-310-0.network.virginmedia.net [80.5.161.37] 5 13 ms 14 ms 11 ms gfd-bb-b-so-200-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.252.192.94] 6 11 ms 12 ms 14 ms gfd-bb-a-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.5] 7 12 ms 18 ms 12 ms gfd-bb-b-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.6] 8 12 ms 11 ms 15 ms gfd-bb-a-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.5] 9 12 ms 17 ms 13 ms gfd-bb-b-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.6] 10 12 ms 23 ms 13 ms gfd-bb-a-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.5] 11 17 ms 13 ms 11 ms gfd-bb-b-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.6] 12 13 ms 36 ms 13 ms gfd-bb-a-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.5] 13 15 ms 13 ms 37 ms gfd-bb-b-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.6] 14 14 ms 13 ms 14 ms gfd-bb-a-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.5] 15 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms gfd-bb-b-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.6] 16 12 ms 15 ms 11 ms gfd-bb-a-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.5] 17 14 ms 29 ms 14 ms gfd-bb-b-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.6].

It just went on like that. At last! I knew why it was timing out. It seems the request had become stuck between two machines that were bouncing it back & forth:

gfd-bb-a-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.5]
gfd-bb-b-ge-000-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.172.6]

I immediately called Virgin back with my findings (after getting past the ‘have you tried resetting your modem’ firewall-of-words) gave them the IP addresses of the machines which seemed to be having fun playing ping-pong with my machines requests. I also posted this on a forum, and one kind Virgin employee responded saying he would look into it tonight. I suspect I may not be the only one with this problem, and that others may experience random problems with specific sites that happen to route any packets through those two servers, but I wonder if it could take the ISP quite some time to spot that something was wrong? I’m told this is known as a routing loop, which may have arisen by a third sever (probably close to the two that have themselves in a loop) which – for whatever reason has gone down. Long story, but fascinating.

Well, let’s hope at least it has been noted. For now I have no access to my site. The only reason I’m able to post this blog is because I’m using one of the many good proxies hide my ass to route the packets through a different machine which doesn’t seem to lie along the path of those two dodgy ones. No, sadly, it will take more than a proxy to hide my ass.