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This page appears courtesy of Snow & Associates, an international research organization dedicated to helping educational, fraternal and professional institutions maintain better information on their alumni/ae, communicate more effectively with them, and relocate those who are lost. Click HERE to visit our home page.
How many times have you tried to visit a website, only to find that you can't get to it... even when you KNOW that the site is there?Or, have you received complaints when users at other institutions are unable to reach a site on your university's server? In situations like this, it is often tempting to contact our own system administrators to complain. However, these problems, and others like them, are becoming increasingly frequent on the 'Web -- and they are often beyond the control of our local administrators. For example, to visit most websites, a "DNS nameserver lookup" is required to convert the name of a domain (such as ARCH.ORG) to an "IP Address" (such as 206.195.95.126) in order to reach the site. If DNS goes down, or is swamped with heavy traffic, it may not be possible to reach a particular site, unless you know the IP address. Traffic jams are also caused by problems at the major "routing hubs" along the backbone of the Internet. When routers are down, or overwhelmed with traffic, serious delays can result. Two ways to determine where bottlenecks occur are to "ping" or "traceroute" a site. If you are running Windows '95 with an active connection to the Internet, simply go to a DOS prompt and enter the command TRACERT DOMAIN.EXT or PING DOMAIN.EXT ... such as TRACERT YAHOO.COM or PING YAHOO.COM for example. These commands will report the delay and data loss along each section of the Internet backbone, from your site to the location you are trying to reach. Asterisks indicate delays. The more asterisks along the route, the longer the delay. Three asterisks generally indicate a bottleneck. If the problem is several hops from your own site, there is little (if anything) your local administrators can do. A web-based tool to trace the route of a remote site is available from FASTLANE.NET:
http://www.fastlane.net/traceroute.htm At this location, you may enter the URL of any site you are trying to reach, and trace the route between FASTLANE.NET and the target site. A web-based tool to ping a remote site is also available:
http://www.fastlane.net/ping.htm Ironically, sometimes the kind of problems discussed above can prevent you from reaching FASTLANE.NET to use these tools. While these tools are helpful in locating the source of problems, they don't correct the problems themselves. Unfortunately, the best solution is usually the oldest one: patience. Because the Internet has developed largely in the absence of centralized control, it is more vulnerable to regional outages than other national resources, such as the interstate highway system, or telephone service. The explosive growth of the WWW in recent years has added to the congestion. This is part of the rationale behind gov't plans for an "Internet II," a more carefully planned information superhighway. In spite of legitimate concerns over 1st amendment issues, this may ultimately prove the only way to effectively manage the huge --and growing-- volume of information moving across cyberspace in the years ahead.
Tips from Previous MonthsClick HERE for reasons why educational, fraternal and professional institutions will use e-mail to communicate with alumni more and more in the future. (July-September '97)
Click HERE for info about the benefits of compiling social security numbers for alumni of your institution. (May-June '97)
Click HERE to read a brief discussion of the 'National Change of Address' service, offered by the U.S. Postal Service. (April-May '97)
Click HERE to see the results of an informal survey about the accuracy of databases maintained by the int'l headquarters offices of greek letter organizations. (March-April '97)
All text and images © 1995-97 by Snow & Associates.
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