Hi there,

I have a problem with the website www.smhs-leeds.co.uk which I have recently taken on after a staff member at the company moved on. My knowledge of hosting sites before this website was limited to simple, static ones typically hosted by something such as Joomla.

The site has been working fine when 3 days ago (no reason or action I can think that has triggered it) the connection simply started to times out. I cannot access the back end of the site through Putty as the connection also times out.

I raised a ticked with the support team who have told me that:

"87.194.167.47" is the IP address of "smhs.co.uk". While the IP address you've provided is allocated to us, it's not assigned to your account."

This was a surprise as I thought the IP of the site was 178.79.135.30. The 87.194..... IP points to a email forwarding service which I've never been told about during handover of the site.

I have a feeling it may have something to do with DNS settings as set out in a support reply below but my problem is I can't access any of the back end to change the DNS settings! Catch 22.

"The site smhs.co.uk is not currently hosted with us, it is on 87.194.167.47 which appears to be operated by Be Unlimited, or O2 Broadband, the whois info for that block isn't very clear. As for smhs-leeds.co.uk, that is hosted within our address space on 178.79.135.30, however that IP address is not tied to any Linodes on your account. Is it possible that your DNS records need to be updated to reflect the site's current location?"

I do have a back up on a server hosted locally but would only really want to push that across to 'live' as a last resort as it seems a) complex and b) it will be out of date by about 1 week.


Any advice would be greatly appreciated, quite a steep learning curve this one!


Alan

Alan, are you sure you can't access your DNS panel connecting to https://manager.linode.com/ ?

What kind of error do you get?

Thanks for replying so soon.

I don't get an error, I get a time out (give it a go) with the message "The server at www.smhs-leeds.co.uk is taking too long to respond.". I also get this when trying to access the files for the site through Putty.

I can indeed see the DNS manager but don't know what our settings should be, there are already settings there though and until Wednesday everthing was working fine!

A final bit is that I've done a Check and my zone is (apparently) fine which just confuses me more, the message I get when checking is :

zone smhs-leeds.co.uk/IN: loaded serial 2011051294
OK

Support told me "We would not be able to assist you in trying to troubleshoot the issue as it does appear to be an internal configuration issue." which leads me to the conlcusion that something has changed at our end but I don't know what an have no way to get to see what's going on!

Thanks

DNS doesn't seem to be the problem here, Apache (or whatever you're using as your web server) doesn't seem to respond to requests.

First of all, check that Apache (or your web server) is actually running (look at the list from the "ps aux" command).

Second, if your web server is running, check if there are any filters blocking your requests (use the command "iptables -L -n" to see if there's a listing for destination port 80 or "any").

I scanned your server, all your ports are closed, open port 80 in your firewall.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

Thank you so much (everyone who replied), you have no idea how much time you've saved me.

Cheers

Alan