On 11 Oct 99, at 13:44, George Woltman wrote:
> The problem on this system is that /etc/host.conf was specifying
> "order hosts" instead of "order hosts,bind". Making the change now
> allows the older mprime to contact the Primenet server.
This may be a partial explanation, however with DNS disabled I don't
see how it used to get a connection to a named server ...
My linux systems (Red Hat 5.1 & 6.0, installed straight from the box
& without fiddling with the various .conf files in /etc) seem not to
have any problems with mprime. There _is_ an issue in configuration,
linuxconf allows you to disable DNS, if you do this I'd expect
problems!!!
I'd also expect problems if you configure the DNS server address(es)
incorrectly, or if there is a fault on the network which prevents the
DNS server(s) from being reached. As a professional network operator,
could I point out that this is actually one of the commonest causes
of users reporting "problems with the network", especially if other
people appear to be working normally.
Actually I found difficulty in contacting the PrimeNet server
entropia.com yesterday morning (Sun 10th from 0700 GMT), this seems
to have been a real problem with the server or its network connection
as everything else was running OK. I just simulated a break in the
network (by unplugging the LAN cable) & did "mprime -c" to force a
connection to the server; after a couple of minutes (maybe three) it
gave up & reported "Error 2250". So maybe the Sunday morning server
outage is what caused the sudden rash of problems, unfortunately
coincident with people upgrading to v19 & probably wanting to get
more work due to the benchmark speed change caused by the upgrade.
Tip for diagnosis of problems: entropia.com's IP address is
207.104.25.155 (though this isn't fixed, it shouldn't change often).
If you're getting problems connecting to entropia.com, try pinging
the numeric IP address; if that works, try pinging by name. If the
first fails, there is a network fault; if the second fails, there is
a fault in the DNS configuration or server; if both work, you *may*
have an application error (though there's still a chance that the
server isn't running the appropriate protocol for your application).
Windows users might care to try a nice program called CyberKit, which
is freeware & does ping, traceroute & NS lookup (amongst other
things). You should be able to find it on TUCOWS and/or NONAGS.
Unix users have these applications bundled with the OS 8-)
Regards
Brian Beesley
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