Site access problems

[Lefteris_D]

For the past few hours allot of you may have been experiencing problems while trying to access the site and forums. So far these problems seem to have been caused by the DNS servers handling the requests regarding the emulator-zone.com domain (and many more domains hosted by the same DNS service for that matter).

We are hoping that this problem will be resolved soon.

Edit: We've changed DNS service providers, so the problems should be over.

[-=VampyR=-]

Thanks for explaining this.
I've even asked users on other forums to access EZ (besides some friends)...I thought it was something wrong with my ISP.
I wanted to e-mail one of the admins/mods here but didn't know any of your mails :p.
I've tried almost every way possible to access EZ.

[Lefteris_D]

Now with this DNS problem your emails might have not gone through at all even if you had it.

If you know how to edit a hosts file add these two lines at the bottom of it as a temporary solution:
# Emulator Zone DNS
216.32.88.252 www.emulator-zone.com
216.32.88.252 forums.emulator-zone.com

It should be ok to remove that in a couple of days.

[hagbard]

I noticed it, thanks for the confirmation, but it wasn't a big trouble since I was at work (and with so yet so many nice real troubles)

[-=VampyR=-]

You guys should have a general problem e-mail adress..Gmail or Yahoo.
Not the personal ones.

[Lefteris_D]

Well this problem does not happen often and it's not in our control either. It's the registar's responsibility to maintain a safe and secure name server.

[GHDpro]

Okay... I have ditched EZ's domain registrar's own DNS service and switched to another.
All problems should now be over -- hopefully.

[Lefteris_D]

I just restored my original hosts file. Let's see how long it will take for my ISP to update it's DNS cache.

[GHDpro]

I just restored my original hosts file. Let's see how long it will take for my ISP to update it's DNS cache.
That will hopefully be extremely fast -- as the DNS server was simply
down your ISP simply won't have any old DNS information cached.
Also since the DNS data itself didn't change, that's no problem either.

The only thing that could go wrong is your ISP actually caching the "down"
state of the DNS service. But I don't see any reason why DNS servers should
do that...

PS. Lefteris: I left more details in the thread on AS.

[Alexander_13]

the web now works so cheers i love this forum ;)

[Lefteris_D]

The good news is that as of 20 minutes ago I can access the main site again without the need to edit my hosts file. Perhaps my ISP was too busy doing that scheduled upgrade they talked about? Hmm...

[Zach]

That's why I use Treewalk DNS

http://ntcanuck.com/

[Lefteris_D]

Thank you for the link, I was looking for some kind of a program to replace my ISP's dns servers in case of a failure in times of emergency. For now I'll continue using them though.

Regarding the actual problem, it was nothing more than a DDOS attack on the DNS servers of the registar EZ is using. Any domain using their DNS servers to serve their records had the same problem(in my case however my ISP made it allot worse by not refreshing the local cache quick enough).