Posted on 09/23/2001 11:03:42 PM PDT by Ron C.
There is an error in the DNS tables that contains the information necessary to route traffic from the ISPs all around the country and the world to Free Republic. We discovered the error around midnight on Friday night. At this time, we do not know what caused the error to occur. We assume it was an error made by the domain registration people who are handling our account, however, no one there seems to know how it happened either.
We submitted an update to correct the error shortly after we discovered it Friday night. They tell us that it takes at least 24 hours for the update to start circulating out to the DNS servers and it may take another 24 to 48 hours or more to reach them all after that.
Worse, it seems that not all servers have been updated yet with the erroneous information. That means if your DNS server happens to get updated with the bad IP addresses today, you may suddenly find that you cannot reach Free Republic.
If your browser suddenly reports that Free Republic cannot be found or you get to a page that says Free Republic is under construction, then you will know that your DNS server is affected. When this happens, you may still get to Free Republic by using our IP address.
The url is:
http://206.112.97.70
Unfortunately, you will not be able to login or post while using our IP address. The login cookies only work by domain name.
If you are technically inclined, there is a work around. You may edit your local "HOSTS" file to include an entry for Free Republic that will override the DNS tables. The entry would look similar to this: "www.freerepublic.com 206.112.97.70"
There is a discussion about how to do this for Windows users here:
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3bad3d29442f.htm
And for Mac users:
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3badfdcd77ea.htm
If you do edit your local HOSTS file, be sure to remove your edit after it is no longer needed.
TO EVERYONE:
Whether you are affected by this error or not, be sure to visit and bookmark our contingency site on Yahoo! Clubs. We posts notices and information here anytime there are problems with Free Republic or the network and Free Republic is down for more than just a few minutes:
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/freerepublic
There is also an ongoing discussion on Yahoo regarding how to find work arounds for this problem.
We are truly sorry that this error occurred and we apologize that it's taking so long to get it cleared up. We were hoping that it would all be cleared up by this morning, but obviously that has not happened for all.
I kept messing around until I got on, I have no idea what I did as I tried so many different things. Don't know how long it is going to last though.
1) Save your personal data.
2) Format your hard drive and install a good OS, preferably Unix.
3) In Linux/Unix, edit /etc/hosts, add: 206.112.97.70 www.freerepublic.com
Done! No reboots needed in Unix.
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Windoze: http://206.112.97.70/forum/a3bad3d29442f.htm
Mac: http://206.112.97.70/forum/a3badfdcd77ea.htm
In order to answer you, I had to click onto another poster's nic and type your nic , after I erased that one. I can't get into my mail, I can only open a few threads, and it's all just hot or miss.
Welcome home FR! Even my MS ME edition of blue screens is happy this morning!
Is there some sort of connection (pardon the pun) with DNS server problems and the missing eagle, or did somebody just shoot it?
It is nice to be able to post again...
Apparantly the problem is being fixed (at least in my area) and that other FreeRepublic site is NOT FR.
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