Possible problem with wiki?

Fallen London
1

For several weeks now, I have been unable to reach the new Fallen London wiki. When I try, I reach a page that says this: &quotHmm. We’re having trouble finding that site. We can’t connect to the server at fallenlondon.wiki. If that address is correct, here are three other things you can try: Try again later. Check your network connection. If you are connected but behind a firewall, check that Firefox has permission to access the Web.&quot When I issue the &quotping&quot command to &quotfallenlondon.wiki&quot, I get the message &quotTemporary failure in name resolution.&quot

Is anyone else having this kind of problem? My husband the computer programmer thinks this is a problem with the new site.

Any information anyone has would be appreciated. Thanks.

2

No, it has been fine for me. The only problem I had for a while is that in Google searches sometimes only entries from the old wiki would show up, but that doesn’t seem to be happening now.

3

It sounds like the name server you are using doesn’t know about fallenlondon.wiki.
Are you having similar problems with other sites?
What does the command “nslookup fallenlondon.wiki” return?

4

That sounds a bit like the nameserver is returning SERVFAIL. That could be a problem with your local dns service or something upstream.

I know fallenlondon proper uses a fancy distributed CDN which probably plays cute tricks with DNS, but I don’t know if the wiki does too or is a rather simpler setup. I have noticed that when fallenlondon is slow to respond the wiki is also, which suggests shared resources somewhere.

If you’re using a decent OS then this may be more helpful than nslookup: &quotdig +trace fallenlondon.wiki.&quot That will help to distinguish where the problem is.

The whole wiki. TLD is relatively new and it used to be fashionable amongst overly paranoid server administrators to block queries for TLDs that &quotshouldn’t exist&quot. Just a hunch.

5

Wiki is in fact a simpler setup - pair of nameservers with one A record and one AAAA record. Though we are using DNSSEC.

“Temporary failure in name resolution” is probably a Linux error message rather than a Windows error message, so yes, “dig +trace” would probably provide more useful info.

6

[quote=falbert]It sounds like the name server you are using doesn’t know about fallenlondon.wiki.
Are you having similar problems with other sites?

What does the command &quotnslookup fallenlondon.wiki&quot return?[/quote]

My husband and I both had been, but he no longer is and 99% of my trouble has been with the FL Wiki site.

The command you suggested returns the following:

;; Got SERVFAIL reply from 192.168.1.1, trying next server
Server: 2001:470:e34c:2::1
Address: 2001:470:e34c:2::1#53

** server can’t find fallenlondon.wiki: SERVFAIL

7

That sounds a bit like the nameserver is returning SERVFAIL. That could be a problem with your local dns service or something upstream.

I know fallenlondon proper uses a fancy distributed CDN which probably plays cute tricks with DNS, but I don’t know if the wiki does too or is a rather simpler setup. I have noticed that when fallenlondon is slow to respond the wiki is also, which suggests shared resources somewhere.

If you’re using a decent OS then this may be more helpful than nslookup: &quotdig +trace fallenlondon.wiki.&quot That will help to distinguish where the problem is.

The whole wiki. TLD is relatively new and it used to be fashionable amongst overly paranoid server administrators to block queries for TLDs that &quotshouldn’t exist&quot. Just a hunch.[/quote]

See my response to Falbert. nslookup did return SERVFAIL. I will try dig+trace. Thanks.

EDIT: This is interesting, though I don’t know enough to understand the implications. What I got when I gave the dig+trace command:

; <<>> DiG 9.16.6-Ubuntu <<>> +trace fallenlondon.wiki
;; global options: +cmd

;; Received 28 bytes from 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) in 12 ms

RE: Your comment about TLD–I had no trouble reaching the wiki originally. My trouble started several weeks ago when we were having actual DNS problems. I’m sorry I can’t recall more than that.
edited by Catherine Raymond on 7/23/2021

8

I am no networking wizard, but I would assume

  1. 192.168.1.1 is your modem/router
  2. it might have (cache?) problems with that specific address … some might get resolved by restarting the modem (but I wouldn’t count on it)
    – the modem’s software might have some builtin diagnostic tools including its own dns lookup, I would try looking for that and seeing if it succeeds or fails to resolve fallenlondon.wiki
  3. it might be getting bad/incorrect/confused answers from its own upstream dns server (which modems normally get autoconfigured from ISPs on connection).
  • you might want to check the modem’s configuration to get the IP address of the dns server that it is using, and then trying to resolve locally against that, for example this will resolve against google’s public dns (which has more addresses, but I remember 8.8.8.8):
    dig +trace fallenlondon.wiki @8.8.8.8

If you get good answers from public DNS servers but bad answers from your ISP’s DNS servers, it might be time to configure either your modem or your PC to use the public DNS always (and keep the previous IP as a backup)
(for example I see that my local configuration on this PC is, in priority order, two opendns servers, two google servers, my modem (which delegates to my ISP))

For all this, I am assuming that you have no problems with any other domain names.

9

Apologies for not coming back to you earlier…

As xKiv is saying -
Most probably, your local router/modem is set up to use a DNS server that cannot resolve fallenlondon.wiki correctly.

You can change your router’s DNS server to for example 8.8.8.8. If you can’t do that, change the DNS server on your computer instead.

10

Thanks for the advice.