Forum not reachable

There is no category for administrational topics, so it is placed here.

Since the beginning this forum has been temporarily unavailable, which is due to the fact that the name resolution of the URL does not work.

When you check it on a console it look like this:

nslookup discourse.bring4th.org

server can’t find discourse.bring4th.org: SERVFAIL

But it should look like this:

nslookup discourse.bring4th.org

Non-authoritative answer:
discourse.bring4th.org canonical name = bring4th.hosted-by-discourse.com.
Name: bring4th.hosted-by-discourse.com
Address: 64.62.250.111
Name: bring4th.hosted-by-discourse.com
Address: 2602:fd3f:0:ff06::111

and

nslookup bring4th.org

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: bring4th.org
Address: 67.227.191.165

Now this two IP’s had been added manually to the hosts file with the hope that this will help.

67.227.191.165 bring4th.org
64.62.250.111 bring4th.hosted-by-discourse.com

Someone else encountering such problems?

It’s working fine for me. Must have been an intermittent issue.

No - that happens every day, sometimes often a day for let’s say about half an hour.

I’ve never had any issues myself.

@B4.Steve, do you think we could find something in the logs?

Does anyone else in Germany experience it? Hard to know maybe…
I may be paranoid, but I have noticed my isp changing my dns servers… I have to check it often.

Unfortunately, we are using an external service on an independent server, so we’re no longer in a position to inspect networking logs.

Since there are folks who are having problems, as well as folks who are not, is not likely to be the Discourse server itself.

As some of you have pointed out, the DNS servers are preventing certain connections from happening.

For those of you who are modifying your hosts file, you need to do a DNS flush to “bust your cache”. This is different on both Windows and Mac. Here’s a pretty good link to accomplish this:

Don’t forget, DNS is the text version of the IP address. So I’d be interested in hearing if any of you can access the forums through IP address only whenever the text URL is not resolving.

Sorry for the inconvenience it’s causing for some of you, hopefully we can get closer to cracking the case!

1 Like

Are you paying a lot for hosting on Discourse servers? I heard it’s expensive like a few hundred dollars a month.

When you want it is possible to start a small ping-test with log here, that will test the name resolution let’s say every minute?

Besides - here is running dnsmasq as a central private DNS-Server for DNS resolution, that uses 5 different DNS-Server to avoid censoring over DNS.

Yes - it is not related to Discourse, it is more related to bring4th.org, because there seems to be an DNS-Forwarding from bring4th.org to the server of Discourse.
In the history there where the same DNS problems with the access of bring4th.org.

Some minutes ago it happened again that the forum was not reachable.
The entries in the file /etc/hosts of the local Linux-PC did not solve the problem, but after adding the two entries to the hosts file of the server that runs dnsmasq, the forum has been instantly reachable again.
This is a clear evidence for an DNS problem, that this domains are disappearing in public DNS resolution temporarily.