Troubleshoot Thyself!

As a client of FutureHosting, you could probably be a web hosting provider and technical support for your clients is inevitable. Providing technical support requires you to possess some basic troubleshooting skills. Even if you are not reselling web hosting services, basic troubleshooting steps will help you to diagnose the issue when you are unable to access your website. In this blog, we will discuss some basic troubleshooting steps that you can perform before you submit a ticket. These self diagnostic tests will help you figure out where exactly the problem lies, whether it is in your PC/ISP or at our side (server/network).

1) Third Party Monitoring websites:

The first step to check whether your website is down or not is to check it using a third party monitoring service. There are many website monitoring services which allows you to check whether your website is responding or not from multiple locations across the world. Some of the free third party website monitoring services are:

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com

http://www.alertra.com/spotcheck.php

2) FHstatus:

If the third party monitoring service reports your website as DOWN, there could be an on-going issue at our side. Since we monitor our servers 24/7 and have 3rd level system administrators on shift all the time, we will update details about the issue at FutureHosting’s Server/Network Status update website, http://www.fhstatus.com – If you do not find any updates there, please open a ticket in our Help Desk.

3) Traceroute:

If the third party monitoring service reports your website as “UP”, then it is likely to be an issue in your PC or at your ISP’s network. To check this, you can use a trace route utility. The trace route utility will be available in most Operating Systems. In this blog, we will take a look at how to run a trace route command in Windows XP. Trace route is a network utility that traces the path taken by your network to reach a host. It shows all nodes the packet travels from sender to destination (also reffered as ìhopsî in the network), the hostnames if available, IP addresses and the amount of time in milliseconds that took the reach that specific host.

To run a trace route command, please follow the steps below:

* Click “Start” button and then click “Run”

* Type the following in the Run box:

cmd

* Press Enter and the Command Prompt window will open.

* Now type the following command in the Command Prompt window:

tracert www.yourdomain.com

* Press Enter

Note: You may have to wait for a few seconds/minutes for the trace route command to complete depending upon your network speed.

Now lets take a look at a few trace route examples:

C:\>tracert futurehosting.biz

Tracing route to futurehosting.biz [64.49.251.84]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 72.44.81.1
2 157 ms <1 ms <1 ms 72.249.0.65
3 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms te-3-4.car1.Dallas1.Level3.net [8.9.232.73]
4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms ae-4-99.edge2.Dallas3.Level3.net [4.68.19.204]
5 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.205.35.221
6 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms tbr1.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.123.16.202]
7 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms cr1.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.18.145]
8 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms cr2.hs1tx.ip.att.net [12.122.28.158]
9 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms tbr2.hs1tx.ip.att.net [12.122.21.222]
10 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms gar4.hs1tx.ip.att.net [12.122.103.65]
11 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 12.87.122.246
12 9 ms 9 ms 10 ms vl130.core1.sat.rackspace.com [64.39.2.33]
13 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms vlan907.aggr7.sat.rackspace.com [64.39.2.218]
14 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms supportnode.thtdomains.com [65.61.161.247]
15 * * * Request timed out
16 * * * Request timed out
17 * * * Request timed out

Trace complete.

The above trace route is timing out at the end of the trace route result. It is just before reaching the server as you can see the node name in the last hop. This usually means that your IP is blocked in the server’s firewall. Since you won’t be able to access the server when your IP is blocked, you will have to submit a ticket in our Help Desk so that we can unblock/remove your IP from your server’s firewall.

C:\>tracert futurehosting.biz

Tracing route to futurehosting.biz [64.49.251.84]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

Trace complete.

The above traceroute is timing out in the beginning itself, just after the ISP’s gateway. This usually indicates that there is a problem at your ISPs network and they should be informed about it. You can contact them along with the trace route result to resolve this issue from their end.

C:\>tracert futurehosting.biz
Unable to resolve target system name futurehosting.biz.

The above traceroute does not resolve the target domain name. This is a DNS issue and it could be either a DNS cache issue or a DNS change hasn’t propagated to the DNS server used in your PC. You can try clearing/renewing your DNS cache to resolve this issue. You can consult your Operating System’s manual for instructions to clear/renew the DNS cache. In some cases this may not work as it could be cached in the DNS servers itself. These DNS servers are normally provided by your ISP and can be changed manually in your PC. You can change the DNS addresses to a more reliable DNS provider like OpenDNS, Level3, etc. To change your DNS address, please follow the instructions provided at < https://www.opendns.com/start?device=windows-xp >

If you are unable to figure out what could be causing the issue, please open a ticket in our Help Desk along with the trace route result and we will be happy to assist you. To copy-paste the traceroute result, you can right click the Command Prompt window and click on ìMarkî. Now drag and select the result to highlight it and press Enter to copy it.

The above troubleshooting steps will allow you to cut short the time required for resolving an issue. If you still have any doubts regarding the above steps, please do open a ticket in our Help Desk and our staff will be more than happy to assist you further!

Troubleshoot Thyself!

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