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View Full Version : Unexpected Website Downtime - 12/28/2009



ddavison
December 28th, 2009, 17:20
The websites www.fantasygrounds.com and www.smiteworks.com were down earlier today for at least 4 hours and may still be down for some users. If you are able to reach this but know of others who are still having problems, you can tell them that the sites should be reachable without the "www" extension.

Evidently, the company hosting the DNS records for the sites was purchased about a year ago by a larger company about a year ago. They were either merging these two sets of DNS records or making some other change related to the acquisition and they inadvertently broke the records for all subdomains. The net result was that the IP address for "fantasygrounds.com" would return correctly but "www.fantasygrounds.com" would not.

I will be looking to switch these to another host where I can better manage these directly and we can hopefully avoid future unexpected outages like this. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Doug Davison
President
SmiteWorks USA, LLC

cryptoknight
December 28th, 2009, 21:13
Does this also impact the ability to check for updates, create new campaigns, or load existing campaigns?

I've got two full licenses installed and both of my pcs are doing the same thing.

tenkar
December 28th, 2009, 23:25
you are not alone crypto.

doug is a good egg. i expect him to find a solution. or a resolution. before the revolution. ack... losing it! ;)

ReikaMichiko
December 28th, 2009, 23:36
mannnn i had a good game planned for my grp today to!

JMOxx75
December 28th, 2009, 23:50
If you disable the alias option you can run Lan games just fine.
Which means you would have to use Hamachi over the internet.

ReikaMichiko
December 28th, 2009, 23:59
If you disable the alias option you can run Lan games just fine.
Which means you would have to use Hamachi over the internet.

ty for the tip, were working on that now

ddavison
December 29th, 2009, 05:07
I posted this in response to another thread, but this is the best place for it actually:


The ISP problem has persisted. I was traveling fro the holidays and just now got back. It is midnight here so I am off for the next 8 hours or so.

Checking the External IP address within FG or acquiring an alias for games is still broken since those access the URLs and not an address on the root domain. You may still be able to host and connect to a game via external IP address but you will need to identify your external address through some other means. You also need to turn off the IP address. Going to https://www.whatismyip.com/ should be sufficient. Your players will then need to use that address to connect. You can still launch games as far as I can tell once you've done those steps.

Please note, that this is still not ideal since FG will treat the connection as a brand new campaign connection for the players and re-download and build the entire cache - I believe. It is nearly morning in Finland now, where the DNS is presently hosted. I have asked Ville (one of the former owner/devs) to place a call for me when he is available.

I am sorry for the interruption in service. This was through no changes or faults on our end but it is sufficient for us to begin looking for a new host. I will ask Ville to post to the forums if he is able to get the issue resolved before I am available tomorrow morning.

-Doug

ddavison
December 29th, 2009, 05:39
While we wait for the problem to be resolved, there is a temporary workaround posted here (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11463).

ddavison
December 29th, 2009, 17:38
The problem should be resolved now.

ReikaMichiko
December 29th, 2009, 22:54
Eh you made an awesome fricken program , I think 1 slip up especially 1 not on your end is allowed.

Andugus
December 30th, 2009, 00:49
Nice job staying on top of this during the holidays. Not only did you provide temporary relief, but you managed to root out the cause rather quickly. In addition, now that the threat to stability is identified you are preparing to eliminate it.

Well done.