Drudge Report

[Democrat for Bush]

Has Matt's site crashed? Haven't been able to bring it up for two or three hours.

[Revel]

Well I could get it again too. For several hours. But it is gone again. Along with another site that I could get all day.

[tortoise]

Don't know if something changed, but we can again access Drudge Report. Let's hope everything is resolved - permanently.

A bunch of network companies have maintenance windows scheduled for tonight where they are going to reprogram their routers to route around Level3 blackholing Cogent address space. Most everyone should get the rest of the 'net back tonight, though the network routing topology will definitely be suboptimal. With luck, any resulting outages will be minimal.

I would add that blackholing BGP definitely violates convention for Internet network operators. As much as Cogent is a bottom feeder, Level3 is earning itself few friends with this very impolite behavior. They should have de-peered and left it at that. There is going to be a backlash because of this, though mostly invisible to the world, but the Internet will become stronger as a result.

[tortoise]

Well I could get it again too. For several hours. But it is gone again. Along with another site that I could get all day.

We've been seeing routing sessions going up and down all over the place with major providers. This problem has removed a lot of the redundancy, and wholesale rerouting is problematic in that it is never foolproof and often errors and issues get accidentally introduced. Due to the degraded state of the topology, it is far more obvious at the moment when a network engineer makes a mistake or a piece of hardware hiccups.

This should mostly be worked out by morning. As I stated in a previous post, everybody is trying to reprogram their routers tonight to compensate. Expect the network to flap tonight while they implement this.

[Revel]

Thank you for all of wisdom in this matter. You obviously know what you are talking about.

[Desert_Girl]

Okay, this crap is starting to tick me off!

[TexasCajun]

There is no Drudge on RR here in Houston as well, problems yesterday too.

[pro610]

I,m going to deduct money from my bill for the number of days I can,t get Drudge on RR.
There not giving me full service.
I urge everyone to do the same.

[Rob_DSM]

I am on RR here in Texas. I haven't been able to get on to drudge in the last couple days. I tried that weather underground, and I couldn't reach that site, either.

What's going on here?

[Rob_DSM]

All this jargon is too much for me. What can we do to monetarily affect whichever party is to blame for this? You are claiming that Level3 acted unconventionally with the result of screwing up service for many people, right? Is Cogent any more or less to blame for this? I just want to know who to bitch at and how to hurt them. I was already pissed with RR's spotty "always on" connection, and now I really feel violated that I can't access certain sites period.

How can we financially damage whoever is to blame?

[Airborne Longhorn]

Same here: RR in Houston.

No Drudge today, nor yesterday...

Anybody have an idea wassup?

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1497773/posts?page=3

See #6 for work around

[pro610]

Thank you,
Drudge comes up perfectly now

[Airborne Longhorn]

You are soooo nice! Thanks for the relief!

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

If you all are still having problems getting to sites like Drudge and Photobucket, there is a work around at this point.

See this thread for what specifically is the problem, and go here to find the work around. It is a tiny download and requires no configuration at all. What it does is establish a Virtual Private Network through google, and gets around the part of the net which is causing you guys these problems. When things work fine again, it is easily removed. Ignore the fact that it says wifi, since the VPN part works fine on wired connections as well, and that is what does the end run around the broken part of the internet backbone(s)

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

To everyone above.... works on XP and 2000 only!!

[Desert_Girl]

I am getting drudge now, as of about an hour ago, but still not the other sites. Does this fix work for all sites or is it just drudge?

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

It fixes them all. RR has done some short term hack work around for the Drudge site, but this program takes you out into googles backbone, and they can get everywhere, and thus you will be able to get everywhere too. Once the root cause problem goes away, you can easily uninstall it as well, but I plan on keeping it for when I connect to public wireless stuff, since the primary reason for a VPN is to encrypt data and keep you secure. The fact that this also fixes your current issues is a coincidental side benefit... but not the purpose of VPN's

[Desert_Girl]

thanks so much!

[mass55th]

As of last night, my Road Runner access to Drudge was working again, and it's still working now. I'm on an Mac, using Safari. No problems at all.

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

RR did a quick and dirty fix for Drudge, but there are still lots of places you can't reach. This specific fix would not work on a mac, but there are ways to do this kind of thing for a mac.