I would ping Admin_Technical, but I don’t think such an account exists!
So, ping..
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A209.157.64.201
Probably not many people noticed, but FR changed its IP address over the weekend, from 209.157.64.201 to 209.157.64.200.
I've seen both of them used over the years. Originally it was 209.157.64.200 and then it was 209.157.64.201 for a while. And apparently now it's back to the original again.
That's why there are DNS servers out there, so you don't have to use IP numbers ... LOL ...
Just stick to http://www.freerepublic.com/ as that's the way you're supposed to use it so you don't run into problems like you've just mentioned ... :-)
FR is moving like its using an old 286 Tandy with 1meg of ram as for a server.
When I ping www.freerepublic.com it resolved to 209.157.64.201 and it time out.
You meant you hardcoded \Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts or Apple and Linux /etc/hosts
added line
209.157.64.200 www.freerepublic.com
?
It’s all Greek to me. Just happy to know I wasn’t going crazy. Was beginning to have withdrawal symptoms when I couldn’t get on yesterday! Glad it’s back to normal today!
I’m so low tech, I don’t save host numbers. I just save the addy to my favorites.
You’ve hit upon part of FR’s unique presence in the online world. I’ve had posts or replies turn up on Google in less than a minute.
We could sway Google Trends all by our lonesome, if we cared to do so, not to mention routine searches. Already do, actually, but it’s not likely to have been a conscious thing with most.
Politicians who are unloved here just have to hate it. Watch certain trolls, and certain trollish FReepers, repeatedly namedrop combined with obvious combinations of keywords like mad whenever things are coming to a head. It happens on both pro and con.
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Here’s the reason you couldn’t connect...
One of our primary servers crashed. We now have the main system running on a secondary server until John repairs or replaces the one that fried. We have several servers at FR all performing various functions. Each server has its own IP address so that’s why you may now be seeing a different IP. It was not a DOS attack. Nothing nefarious. Just a hardware crash. We usually have two servers serving web pages and two serving the database and others doing various tasks. Usually a server going off line wouldn’t crash the entire system but this time it did and John had a bit of a problem getting it all running again.
If you do an NSLookup on www.freerepublic.com you’ll see that both the .200 and .201 addresses come up. This means that either one can respond to hits on that name. For some reason both servers went down. One of them appears to still be down, and since you had it hard-coded in your hosts file, it couldn’t work on the other one once it became available again. It wasn’t a change in IP addresses.
I thought something might be going on.
I was having trouble getting onto FR a couple of nights ago. In troubleshooting, I could reach FR from my work computer, but not from my home machine.
From work, I pinged FR’s domain, and received an address in the reply. I then minimized my RDP session to get back onto my home computer, and typed http://(ip address), and got right on. I then knew it was a DNS issue of some sort. I flushed the DNS cache on my home machine, and all has been well since.