Obviously, the world has better things to worry about than my internet connection but I was curious as to whether or not there was any connection between the fact that I couldn't reach the ThailandFriends server and my own other server (as well as many other websites) all last night and this morning.

Sometime last evening the DNS for both servers quit resolving.

ping: cannot resolve thailandfriends.com: Unknown host

I figured it might just be a temporary issue and went to bed. In the morning it was still down. I tried accessing the site from some proxy servers located in the US and they could find the sites just fine.

So as a last ditch effort I switched my DNS from the default from TOT to Google's Public DNS:

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

Bam! Immediately I was able to reach both my servers. I'm starting to wonder if TOT routes some of their traffic through Japan which means that in order to query DNS servers in the US or Europe if they take the Japan route the sites will appear to be offline.

Because it wasn't just my two servers. There were quite a few US/Europe based sites I was unable to reach and there didn't seem to be any other connection to the outage such as domain name host, DNS provider, etc. Pretty random.

Oh well, fixed now and you might want to check out the Google Public DNS in case you ever have a similar issue.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

Pinch me.

Well, like I said, there are much bigger things to worry about. Just sharing an experience and a possible solution should others find themselves in similar circumstances.

But the other sites I couldn't reach were sites like Wikipedia and such. Certainly something strange going on.

Yes, quite.

Did you try a trace route to the server location to see where it was going? That would be the quickest way to see if it was routing through Japan, and where it was dropping the connection.

You can't traceroute an unknown host. TOT's DNS servers don't even know that the domain exists. It couldn't even get an IP address let alone a route. I'm assuming that some domain authority servers or DNS servers might have had routing problems because of Japan. The fact that the sites came up right away as soon as I switched DNS tells me that the actual route to the servers was not a factor.

The other thing it could have been is some total botched update on their DNS servers. Could have had nothing to do with the route to the authoritative DNS servers and just been a case of some bonehead configuring a router incorrectly.

I have been having the same problem here in the UK. Don't know what is causing it.

Everything is normal from here.

WHERE'S MY JAPANESE PORN??

OK, just thought the TF server would have been on a static IP.

OK, just thought the TF server would have been on a static IP.

It is on a static IP.

You have a registrar where you register your domains. They have the information about who owns the domain and who the contacts are. You also tell them who is providing your DNS records. Next you have a DNS server or service. There you tell them what IP address the domain (or domains) should point at.

When you type in a URL or click on the link the first thing that has to happen is that www.thailandfriends.com needs to get translated into an IP address. That is done, usually, when you ask your internet provider's DNS servers to find out. They ask the registrar what is the authoritative source for the IP address. Then the DNS server goes to the DNS server that the registrar said was authoritative for that domain and asks for the IP address. Once it has an IP address then it begins to route your request over the network to the server where the website is.

The problem was that when I typed in the URL or clicked on certain links, for some reason, TOT's DNS servers were not able to find either the registrar or if they did they could not find the DNS server hosting the information about those domains.

Like I said, the problem was fixed the second I change from using TOT's DNS servers to Google's which is why I made the previous comment about it possibly being a f'up on TOT's part and have nothing to do with Japan.

Try changing your static ips to moving ones mate if that doesn't work you're bollocksed.