Weird one this – last Friday our work website became inaccessible from our work computers which is a problem as we need to work on it!

We’ve asked people not on site to check the website and it works fine for everyone else.

We’ve swapped the router, cleared the router, switched everything on and off again but we still can’t access it. Our web developers say everything is working fine.

I’ve tried accessing it through a proxy server this morning and that works fine through that (www.free-proxyserver.com).

So what could be the problem!?

Internal Active Directory domain named the same as your website domain?

Points to DNS I would say, try running an nslookup for the domain name at the command prompt of one of your machines and see what the result is.

Thanks – a bit out of my comfort zone!

What should I type and what should I be looking for?

simon_g + 1000

Would that be something at our end (in the office network), or with our website hosting people?

What did you install on Friday? Security software like webroot can cause this.

Thanks – a bit out of my comfort zone!

What should I type and what should I be looking for?

nslookup <enter>
domain you want to lookup e,g
www. google. co.uk <enter>(minus the spaces)

You are looking at the address returned. What is the website you cannot access?

OP – at a guess, your external website is not managed or hosted by your company directly, you get an agency to do it?

If so, I wouls specualte that, as you use Active Directory, that uses a private version of the same Domain Name System (DNS) as the Internet and somebody has put a static entry in there that points to your website on the Internet as, otherwise, your private DNS would tell all your work computers to look internally for the website.

In the meantime, the agency have moved the server that is running your inaccessible website and happily updated the Internets DNS system, so the public can get access but, because you have an old (now incorrect) entry on your private DNS, you can’t see it.

As stated above, I would put a bet on using the nslookup command to get an IP address for the site from your private work network and elsewhere return different addresses.

Rachel

Thanks all – our website is…

http://www.gardenfurnitureoffers.co.uk

When I do nslookup I get an IP of 109.73.168.133

How do we change our DNS?

Who looks after the computers in the office for you? They need to do it.

My nslookup returns the same address as yours and I also can’t access your website.
Not helpful to you, but may help someone else with diagnosing 🙂

Oh – actually – that’s the same IP address I am seeing here.

I *can* see your website.

You did that nslookup from your work PC?

Rachel

What OS and browser? Do you have access to a linux box which has curl installed?

You did that nslookup from your work PC?

Yes

What OS and browser? Do you have access to a linux box which has curl installed?

On Macs and PCs – all browsers tried! We have no access to Linux.

Do you have a list of sites you block access to? Or are all websites viewable from work?

Can you install an extension to your browser e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/header-hacker/phnffahgegfkcobeaapbenpmdnkifigc?hl=en

Or probably more useful can you install http://www.telerik.com/fiddler

(this won’t fix the problem, but might help diagnose – can kind of do what I’d suggest with curl)

Odd, we had a similar problem starting last wed afternoon when the 3rd party DDOS provider our hosting provider uses started deciding the traffic from our internal network was a hacker, and everyone else was fine.

Nice one, i need some new garden furniture.

….oh 😐

Who looks after the computers in the office for you?

the STW hive mind clearly

Well our web designers have sort-of got to the bottom of this problem. It appears to be a BT issue with DNS thingies (and probably combined with something our web designers have done).

So anyone who has their broadband supplied by BT can’t access our site (or any of our web designers other sites). Our web-designers are in discussion with BT so it could take a while!!!

Thanks for all your responses.

When I was in teh bank, we used a 3rd party website for absolutely everything we did. Came in one morning, it’d been blocked by IT. So we called and they said “Yeah, we noticed some people were using this website all the time, so we blocked it”. Took over a week to fix, ironically we spent the whole week surfing the net.

I’m on BT broadband and can access the site.

…working for us now too, just came back up a few minutes ago – only took 4 days to sort out!

I can get to your site now.

Was this just an obscure viral marketing exercise?

Dunno, but I really want some garden furniture now