By Paul Tero CHAPTER 8Eventually, it will reach the hosting company for the website in
question (Continum.net in this case). If it fails there, then the fault may
lie with your hosting company. Or it may simply be that the traceroute is
blocked by a firewall. Or that your website has moved.
Moving webSiTeS
It’s unlikely that your website has moved to a different server without you
knowing, especially as you were just working on it last night, but you can
double-check this.
Every DNS server keeps a cache of every domain name it has been
asked for. This saves clogging up the Internet with requests for things that
rarely change. The downside is that if someone changes the IP address for a
domain like http://www.smashingmagazine.com, it can take 24 to 48 hours for all
the caches to clear so that everyone in the world knows the new IP address.
To ascertain that you have the latest information, you first need to find
out the local name server for the domain name you are querying. To do this,
give nslookup the option -type=ns, like this on Mac, Linux and Windows:
$ nslookup -type=ns http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Server: 194.168.4.100
Address: 194.168.4.100#53
Authoritative answers can be found from:
smashingmagazine.com
origin = a.regfish-ns.net
mail addr = postmaster.regfish.com...
The origin (or sometimes primary name server) is the local DNS
server for http://www.smashingmagazine.com. You can use nslookup again to
query this server directly:
$ nslookup http://www.smashingmagazine.com a.regfish-ns.net
Server: a.regfish-ns.net
Address: 79.140.49.11#53
Name: http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Address: 80.72.139.101