Troubleshooting DNS issues
Yesterday we experienced an issue reaching some of our .org domains and I wanted to write a bit about the troubleshooting process I used to determine what the problem was.
At around 10:15 am I was gathered with most of our company in our main conference room (watching a stream of the inauguration activities) when my pager went off alerting me that one of our sites was down. The first thing I did was verifiy that the web server and database were up and serving content correctly. Next I tried to reach the site from my laptop. This particular site answers to both http://www.financeleaders.org and http://financeleaders.org ordinarily, but at the time only the second was actually responding.
The next step is to verify the DNS results for both those two addresses. Commonly this is done simply with the ping utility. “ping financeleaders.org” gave me the result I expected, but “ping www.financeleaders.org” returned “unknown host.”
