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Tracking The Status Of Popular Websites?
An Unnamed Correspondent asks: "I am one of those that decided, a long time ago, to use a @yahoo.com free mail account as a permanent address, since I move from one ISP to another all the time.
Last week, I was having huge problems with my free account, the SMTP servers for Yahoo! were down. I didn't know if this was a problem local to me or if it was Yahoo!'s fault. I sent them an e-mail asking about this, but I received no reply. I have been browsing all of Yahoo! to see if they have some kind of net status, to no avail. The other day CNN.com was not working for me. Maybe it was overloaded because of the elections, but I didn't know, and I couldn't find out.
Is there some kind of Web page giving news about the status of the more popular Web services?" An interesting idea ... would something like this be possible to pull off in an effective way (and what would one do if the monitoring service itself is unavailable?)
Another Andover site that's still around is one of the earliest online free code archives -- freecode.com.
Nobody ever "heard of" Andover back in those days because each of the company's original sites was treated as a separate entity and we never pushed the "network" thing. But we were there, doing our little thing and having a nice, low-key time. :)
- Robin
The monitoring service would not be a single point -- it would be a network. If nothing else, they could distribute it via Akamai or something similar.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
If I ran one of the big sites, I'd do what everyone else does: blame someone else!
Possible choices:
- Your ISP
- A backbone router went dead
- Your local network admins have put up a firewall...
- You mistyped the URL....
- the site is slashdotted
- etc..etc...
I'm not so sure many of these sites would WANT to have their network outage publicly available. Might be somewhat embarassing for some...
Cheers,
Vic
You can also try pinging yahoo's mail servers.
Personally I think you kind of get what you pay for. I used to use hotmail at one point as I was doing lots of traveling. They LOST some of my email while upgrading there servers. They said sorry. I stopped using them.
Free email is not a lucritive busines. It makes its money through advertising. As you may have heard (or not) advertising on the web is not considered a lucritive business. Hey doubleclick took a hit this last quarter, and there stock was down. You're best bet is to talk to yahoo about a pay account. They have them and then no matter who you use as an ISP you can have access through an @ yahoo mailbox. The other option is to use another portol for free mail.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Well, Netcraft just started tracking web site downtime.
You can see the CNN uptime graph at Netcraft.
This is an interesting idea especially because the big sites tend to outsource their site's infrastructure to the big players, such as Globalcenter, Exodus, AboveNet, Digital Island, Verio, even Akamai.
Tracking which site uses which provider and THEN tracking their availability and performance should give us some indication on how the big names in the hosting business serve their best known customers. This information should prove to be valuable even to those of us who don't really make the hosting companies' most-important-customers list.
Marko Karppinen
I think this would be great, althoug I'd worry about the implementation details. How would you test servers to see if they were up or not? How would you find out what was wrong, exactly, with one of them? If anyone ever makes a web site like this, it would be difficult.
However, if it was done right, ISPs could install a package that sort of "mirrored" the test results, so that their customers could see how things looked at the ISP's offices.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Here's a BETTER idea for how to spend your $15:
Just buy yourself a DOMAIN for only $15 / year at DirectNIC or a number of other BARGAIN domain registrars. DirectNIC offers your domain UNLIMITED numbers of both web addresses and email addresses...
How can this be???? Because each email address/URL merely redirects the mail/URL to your chosen account/site...
SO, you can get your own DOMAIN, HOSTING, REDIRECTION, URL PARKING, and PERMANENT UNLIMITED EMAIL ADDRESSES for the $15 / year bargain.
There was a time when the church ruled and everyone believed in god... this time is known as the Dark Ages. --?
I would think doing something like this would be fairly simple technically, but what about the legal aspects of it. what if the site reports, say, CNN as being down and they sue? (i can think of a number of arguments for a legal action). i don't think we'll see a solution anytime soon unless someone has the negotiating power to actually have a contract with all reportes websites.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
"Last week, I was having huge problems with my free account, the SMTP servers for Yahoo! were down."
"I sent them an e-mail asking about this..."
Sounds like you're looking for a Internet Weather/Traffic Report: Google internet weather report Google internet traffic report
Where can I begin... First, using your ISPs mail server does not mean 'another hop' in the term of your speed... In fact, it takes more bandwidth to send it via your MTA than to send it to your ISP...
Next, where do you get this additional hardware cost stuff? From using your ISPs mail server? its going to cost you to pay for more hardware? Wether you use it or not, they will have a mail server, and you WILL have to pay for it, regardless.
Furthermore, why do you not like the dial up list? Do you know how much spam that stops? Throwaway dial up accounts account for most of the spam sent these days.
Next, Users arent clueless by using their ISPs mail server, and they can run an OS that can handle mail traffic wonderfully, but WHY? they dont NEED to, and, they have the potential of getting their mail rejected because they're on a dialup (including broadband IPs)
Finally, if your ISPs mail servers accept the mail, and say it will be delivered, and it takes 'hours' for it to get there, its more than likely not their fault. Now if you said that you cant connect to your ISPs MTA, then you can blame them...
These are the views of me, a competant mail administrator of a redundant mid-sized network. I speak only the truth of my views, and is not meant to put anyone down, but offer a differant perspective.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
It shouldn't be difficult setting such a site. But as it gets more popular, I wonder if we'll need another page reporting the status of this page
network-tools.com is a site that lets you ping, traceroute, resolve, or otherwise mess with an IP or DNS address. You can always try pinging Yahoo!s SMTP servers or cnn.com from there, at least. Not the most elegant solution, but it works.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
The Yahoo servers for SMTP services that USER CONNECT TO have been quite flaky. I have outages that lasted up to a month. POP3 is also bad from time to time.
Their POP3 servers also appear to be affected adversely by Outlook. I have a friend who insists on using Outlook, and she e-mailed me. Yahoo's POP servers choked on it; I had to log in through their web access to delete the message. It's repeatable, though I don't know what part of the message kills it.
To top it off, she's one of these community college computer science students. She won't listen to me when I tell her that Outlook isn't standards-compliant. (And, I had to do three hours of tech support to help her install a second hard drive in her Windows 98 machine, to demonstrate what her third year at St. Lawrence College has taught her. She still doesn't have it working, mostly because she doesn't believe you can only run two IDE devices on each IDE bus.) <sigh>
Note Yahoo commonly gets swamped the SMTP from outside world into Yahoo system to an actual account can take upto 8 hours. So enjoy the FREE mail.Yeah, I use one of these accounts. I just set up Sendmail on my gateway machine.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I was testing some filters on my mailserver the other day, and I happened to do a test of sending an email to a Yahoo! account. After realizing the mail got stuck in the queue, I inspected Yahoo's mail servers. Unbelievable, They have 6 MX addresses, each one having 13 IP addresses (round robin). Well, I became curious after realizing the machines were up, so I whipped up a script to telnet to the SMTP port of each mail server. Only 2 were accepting SMTP commands! This was (if i remember right) of 75 mail servers. If Yahoo! were to have their network status put up, they would be utterly embarrased. All the machines were available, but either SMTP was closed down, would drop you immediatly after connection, or just not accept any commands at all. The problem now seems to be resolved, but I doubt Yahoo! would admit to such a failure, it would make them look very bad.
Probably the best way to determine an outtage is to do some inspecting yourself, run pings, traceroutes, telnet to the service, test, and probe to find out what could be going on.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
One problem with using a local sendmail to send your email could be if the recipitents mail server uses the MAPS Dialup Blacklist... Basically, what that is is a database of dial up users, and when your mail server sends mail, and it checks your IP address, if it is identified as a dialup, it will not allow your mailserver to communicate. This is why you should use your ISPs mail server. When you use your ISPs mailserver, it will not be on the dialup list, and will be allowed to communicate (unless its on RBL, relay list, etc)
Ironically, as I write this, the mail-abuse.org DNS servers are unavailable. Interesting...
When it comes back up though, goto http://mail-abuse.org for more information
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
Yes, I know this is a tangental point to the article, but...
For a permanent E-mail address, consider a forwarding service, e.g. pobox.com. That's what I use. It's not free, but it's only something like $15/year. The advantage of this is that you can keep the same E-mail address always (or at least for as long as pobox.com survives), even as you move between accounts. If your free hotmail or yahoo account starts to go south, get one somewhere else... and just point your pobox.com forwarding address at the new one.
pobox.com seems to be pretty reliable; I don't think I've lost any E-mail. With few exceptions, every POP/SMTP/mail server I've used has had trouble at one time or another. (We're not even going to talk about @home.) Forwarding services are a little easier to get right. Since I have the freedom to point my "same" E-mail address at any mail server I want, I can achieve greater stability without always having to tell people to change my E-mail addres....
(I also use my own computer's sendmail to *send* mail, instead of an external SMTP server. Hey, why not? It's not like I have sendmail running, I just give it a one-time invocation. I've set it up so that the From address is my pobox.com address.)
-Rob
Netcraft: www.netcraft.com
Netcraft will tell you the uptime history of any site that it watches (currently over 22 million)
Keynote: internetpulse.keynote.com
Keynote has some really cool cross-backbone nodes that tell you the performance from one backbone to another.
Whatsdown.net: www.whatsdown.net
Whatsdown watches various sites and backbones and tells you the current performance of them. This is probably what you want, because it watches specific popular sites.
Check out Google's directory (DMOZ) for some more sites like these. I hope this helped.
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...