The server at www.rencontres-selection.com is taking too long to respond

Question

I get this error message while trying to access this site in firefox.

The site is hosted on a dedibox with Debian, apache2, php5, and bind9.

If run a dig command, or any kind of ping i get the good IP, so the hostname is actually resolved. It's just that it doesn't work in the browser.

I put a test script in the document root, and tried to access it directly but it's the same, so no application problem.

I put the ip in my hosts file on windows and try to access the site again. It worked! So actually there is some kind of dns infinite loop or something like that, that is correctly bypassed by ping or dig, but not by the browser (how strange is that?)

I took the control of this server late in development, so i don't know if the bind daemon on the server is actually the one who should resolve the domain, or someone else, and for that matter nobody knows know, i need to find out. There were some entries for the domain in named.conf file, and i removed them and also asked the client to set other nameserver that should resolve the domain.

I don't have experience with dns. Does anyone have any suggestions of what can i do more to identify the problem ?

UPDATE: so far, i found there is a problem with networking. I did a /etc/init.d/networking restart through ssh and now the server seems to be down. I mean all interfaces are down and i can't connect. The server is not accessible by me. What could be wrong now ?

Answer 1

So, the domain resolves to:

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    rencontres-selection.com
Address:  88.191.110.117

So, DNS seems fine. However, I'm unable to hit it on port 80:

telnet 88.191.110.117 80
Connecting To 88.191.110.117...Could not open connection to the host, on port 80: Connect failed

Ping also doesn't work:

Pinging 88.191.110.117 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Reply from 57.211.69.173: Destination net unreachable.
Reply from 57.211.69.173: Destination net unreachable.

Ping statistics for 88.191.110.117:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 2, Lost = 2 (50% loss),

tracert tells me this:

Tracing route to 88-191-110-117.rev.dedibox.fr [88.191.110.117]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms     4 ms    <1 ms  10.95.133.1
  2     1 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  172.21.100.2
  3     9 ms     1 ms     7 ms  10.95.135.249
  4     2 ms     3 ms     9 ms  57.211.69.173
  5     *     57.211.69.173  reports: Destination net unreachable.

Trace complete.

So, I'm thinking there is something wrong with the router in one of the final hops. It has no idea where to go next to give you access to the server.

Answer 2

You can discover the correct nameservers for a domain using "whois", for example:

  whois rencontres-selection.com

However that shows no results. So we fall-back to:

skx@birthday:~$ dig -t ns rencontres-selection.com +short
sd-18368.dedibox.fr.
nssec.dedibox.fr.

So does that work?

skx@birthday:~$ dig -t a rencontres-selection.com +short @sd-18368.dedibox.fr
88.191.110.117
skx@birthday:~$ dig -t a rencontres-selection.com +short @nssec.dedibox.fr
88.191.110.117

Now we can see that .117 is the host to contact:

skx@birthday:~$ echo -e "GET /\r\nHost:rencontres-selection.com\r\n\r\n" | nc 88.191.110.117 80
[no reply]

So the DNS points to a host which isn't replying, for us. Perhaps it is only replying for you because of a firewall?

Answer 3

Concerning the interfaces that are down after restarting the network:

Dedibox.fr offers KVM over IP. Just give them a call or email them to set it up for you. Then you will be able to take control over the server once again.