Casteele
Posts: 655
Joined: 12/10/2011
From: Near Sacramento, California, USA
Status: offline
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FR
Ignoring the whole drama issue of the dispute, I'll try to shed some light on the whole "acessing the website issue"..
The internet does not actually work on names like "collarme.com" (called a domain name); it works on IP addresses. When you type in an address like "collarme.com" in to your web browser, your web broswer does a DNS lookup, which is similar to finding the phone number of a person by their name using a phone book. The DNS server then replies with the IP address of the collarme.com webserver, which your browser then connects to the *IP address*, not the domain name.
Of course, there's more than one DNS "phone book" worldwide, because trillions of lookups a second would overload even the fastest computers and internet links. So what they do, is have several servers as root servers, several under them as secondary server, and many internet service providers (ISPs) further provide their own DNS servers for their own users. So, when your browser looks up "collarme.com", it first contacts your ISP's DNS server. If that server does not already know the IP address, your ISP's DNS server then contacts a secondary DNS server for the IP. If that server does not know the IP, it'll contact a root server. Now, when the root server replies with the "official" IP address of the "authoritative" DNS server for the collarme.com domain, it also includes a TTL number--Time To Live. This basically tells the secondary server to "save" (cache) the IP address in it's own data for future use, until the TTL expires. Likewise, when the secondary DNS server responds to your ISP's request for the IP address, it passes on the TTL so your ISP can cache the IP address.
At that point, your ISP tells your browser the IP address and TTL so that your computer can connect to collarme.com. Your computer will also cache the IP address for the TTL period, such as for 24 hours. It's this whole TTL caching thing that is the issue right now: Some serversstill have the ORIGIANAL collarme.com IP address cached, so when your borwser requests the IP, it gives the IP it saved, without contacting a root server for an update. But once the TTL expires,the IP address will get purged, and the server will again contact a ISP/Secondary/Root server, and then it will see that "Tiffany" has changed the IP address associated with "collarme.com", and then you will get served the new web page.
So, eventually, ALL users will end up with the wrong page that collarme.com now points to, as soon as the secondary and ISP DNS caches expire and it updates--this is a process called DNS propagation, and generally takes about 24 hours before all stale IP data is purged and new IP data is refreshed.
Thats why some people can still access the site--Somehwere in the chain of DNS queries, the IP address being returned is the stale IP address for the domain, which will eventuallly time out and be replaced.
The CM servers are still up, and if you know their correct IP, you can still access them directly by providing the IP and thus, bypassing the stale DNS issue.Additionally, if you know how to manipulate how your computer's operating system resolves DNS queries (for example, the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file), you can manually override the DNS lookups to point to the correct CM servers. Of course, doing this is fiddling with your computer's techncial data, and should be done with care--for those not so computer savvy, you may need to find a geek friend to do it for you or guide you through it.
Incidentally, for those who do wish to do so, and know what they're doing, here's the (incomplete) list of hosts entries I have to get the site working for me..
# Collarme
68.68.104.8 collarme.com www.collarme.com
68.68.104.9 chat.collarme.com
72.13.91.174 collarchat.com www.collarchat.com
108.161.189.193 cdn.collarme.com collarme.bayshoresoftware.netdna-cdn.com
I'm sure there are plenty more, and if any of the CM officials want to provide them, I'll add them. Likewise, if someone wants to come up with step by step instructions for others to do the same (dealing with issues such as administrative file access to the hosts file, etc) for the "technically challenged", I won't stop you ;-)
Also, the whole provess I outlined above is not *entirely technically accurate*, just a generic/conceptual overview, and simply providing a new domain won't always work, since the HTTP protocol embeds the domain name in the web request and may confuse the CM servers if not set up properly to cope..
Hope this helps some!
Cas
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RE: CollarMe has gone - 
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