I have one hosting customer in Western Canada who regularly sends me email saying that he gets a Gateway Timeout when he tries to point his browser to his site. In fact, if I give him a list of some of my own sites that are on the same server, het gets the same message. Yet at the very same time this is happening, I am able to access the sites. Sites are functional, server is up, everything seems fine. Except that he keeps getting the DNS error...

And if he pings or does a tracert, everything seems OK. But still gets error.

Can someone please take a crack at explaining why/how this happens?

Thanks.

Vito

Hi - when it happens again ask him to try and access his (your) sites by their IP address, if sucessful it shows it is a DNS problem, if it still fails then it isnt - but you will then be at least one step ahead of where you are now and know where to carry on looking :-)

HTH


YB

Thanks, YB. Good suggestion.
I guess when I get his results I'll post here for further suggestions.

Thanks again for the idea. :)

Vito

Could also be a problem with his isp, hence the 'gateway' part of the error, maybe they dont have a good working route to your server(s)? or they are having dns issues like mentioned above. If you like, post a sample ip/domain in here and well see who can access it and who cant ;)

You can use the site in my sig as an example - www.DemoDemo.com . IP is 66.250.86.32 . His site is on the same server.

If it was a matter of his ISP not having a good working route to my server, wouldn't the tracert show a problem?

Thanks for your help.

Vito

Hi - I think your problem is with the name servers ns1 & ns2..waterhosting.com which do not appear to have entries in the waterhosting.com zone file because if you do a 'dig ns1.waterhosting.com' you do not get an answer.

HTH

YB

Geez, I'm really confused now. If I don't have proper DNS zone settings, then how am I able to point to my sites? And my customer is in fact able to access his site, just not all the time.

I checked in WHM and all the site DNS zones appear to be configured in the same way. Besides, I never go into the DNS settings, I let WHM configure them automatically, so how could any be different?

Are you saying that a DNS setting in WHM is not configured properly?

Vito

Hi - no I am not saying that WHM has done anything wrong, but your name servers are not setup quite right. When you do a DNS lookup for any domain it should return the IP address, so when you issue a command to do a DNS lookup such as....

dig demodemo.com

or

dig www.demodemo.com

or

dig ns1.waterhosting.com

or

dig ns2.waterhosting.com

... an IP should be returned, but when I tested the above an IP was not returned for the name servers and it should have. This is the only problem I saw with the DNS and I am not sure that this is your problem, but as it is wrong it just may be ???? Anyway IMO it is best to get this fixed and see if the problem remains or not.

To fix this you will need to add the following entries to the waterhosting zone file...

ns1 IN A 66.250.86.216
ns2 IN A 66.250.86.217

At least this will then be eliminated.

HTH

YB

Thanks, YB.
I'm not really confident in modifying any DNS settings myself, so I think I'll just submit a ticket to my host and see if he can look at it for me.

Thanks very much for your assistance. :)

Vito

Hi - just checked ns1 & ns2.waterhosting.com and tech support appear to have done the zone file correctly :-)

It would be nice if you can let us know if this fixes the problem or not - thanks.

YB

Thanks, YB. Yes, I got confirmation from tech support that they made the changes.

I will definitely let you know if this fixes the problem. I will just have to wait to hear from my customer. :)

Vito