Feb 262011
 

For the last several days, I’ve been unable to access a particular NASA website. Just now I noticed that I can’t acces *any* NASA website. Simply won’t connect. I’ve checked a bucketload of other links, and they all seem to work just fine… just not NASA “.gov” sites. Anyone else have this problem… or is it just me? And if it’s just me… WTF?

 Posted by at 4:03 am

  16 Responses to “This is damned peculiar”

  1. http://www.nasa.gov/ came up OK for me just now.

  2. It worked for me, too. Try using http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com

  3. Sounds like you burned up your lifetime data quota or something 😉

    Jim

  4. The NASA tech report server worked for me a few minutes ago, and there was no problem yesterday.

    Lifetime data quota? I’m doomed.

    I think it may be that NASA knows Scott is in favor of space exploration. That’s not the sort of thing for which they hope to have their resources used, or so it appears to me. So they cut him off.

  5. I had to go in to town, so I took my netbook with me and stopped at McDonalds to use their WiFi. The same netbook that tells me when it’s plugged into the wall at home that, say, apod.nasa.gov doesn’t exist, dials ’em right up no sweat on this WiFi connection. Could mean that whatever problem there was has been resolved, and when I get home everything will be fine. But if I get home and things still don’t work… what they hell does *that* mean?

  6. I have AT&T here,moving and switching to clear.com but so far no
    problems here.

  7. It’s probably trying to connect to the wrong DNS server. Try going into a DOS window while disconnected from any network and enter ipconfig/flushdns.

    NTRS and main site all wide open on Mac and PC.

  8. Sounds like your ISP’s DNS server has had its routing table corrupted. If so, everyone using that DNS server is having the same problem. This happens to me every couple of years, and usually last a couple of days until enough people notice it and contact the ISP’s tech support and they fix it. Also, as the poster above noted sometimes your TCP/IP setup may be specifying an old DNS server that your ISP is no longer actively supporting and they’ve quit updating the routing table on that server.

    Sometimes you can google your ISP and DNS servers ( for instance, “knology dns servers” ) and you can find a list of DNS servers that your ISP is currently using and you can try one of the alternates and that will clear up your problem. This only works btw if the DNS you’re using is working well enough to resolve google’s IP address.

  9. I can get through to the NTRS no trouble.
    I think they found out that you know way too much about what Apollo 18 found already, and banned you. 😉
    BTW, in the ad for that movie, there’s a very short shot of some sort of abandoned spacecraft on the Moon, it looks like a LK Soviet lander.
    Start at the two minute mark in the video:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA2pPv4T2YE
    I’ll bet that cosmonaut got the space herpes on him too!

  10. Update: Still AARRRGH.

    After talking with tech support, the best they could offer was somethign or other about NASA updating their DNS and not yet having gotten around to mine, or some damned thing. Did the flushdns thing with no success. Changed the TCP/IP address from the “automatically find” default to two different ones… weirdly, when using these alternate IP addresses, I can open NASA.gov…. but *only* NASA.gov. No sub-sites, no something.nasa.gov sites.

    So my guess for whatever it’s worth (approximately nothing) is that Mike’s right, or close to it. Having someone at NASA (or in the Obama administration) specifically blocking *me* would be just to paranoid of a conspiracy theory.

  11. Just visited NASA.gov on my phone. No problems.

  12. Scott,
    Using a TOR proxy would route you around a bit and avoid any blocking based on your ip address.
    Using opendns.org would work around your local ISP (wow, not a rocket!)
    having DNS problems.

    -Gar.

  13. Woo! As of Sunday afternoon, connectivity seems to have been completely restored. So presumably the DNS issues have been resolved by whoever is paid to resolve them.

  14. What did you say, Pat? The difference between your statements and Scott’s statements is that he has a website and therefore is much more visible and easily googleable (if I invented that word, I demand credit in the OED).

    What’s unnerving is that we’d even think that NASA would care enough about a few private citizens’ comments to take any action at all. At some level, I think we’ve starting seeing government as being a lot less secure than it should be for an organization that is bigger than a schoolyard gang.

  15. All that is why some cultures limit education to the compliant class.

  16. …Hell, considering all the catamite NASA employees – and D-Day – who demanded that I be banned from the L2 forums without just cause “or they’d pull the console access that the L2 choads get for free and charge money to access”, I wouldn’t put it past one of those bastards to have Scott, Pat or even myself banned from all NASA sites just to be colossal jerks without any real class whatsoever. Considering how bad I’ve slammed the NASA PAO over the years, I’m still surprised that they haven’t gone so far to have me barred from JSC, much less the NASA family of websites.

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