[WEB4LIB] Problems with Yahoo Access

[Michael McCulley]

Just a few thoughts on this one.. and it's often a ping pong match back and
forth with various technical geeks (that's a *good* word when I use it..)
and sysadmins and the like, until it will be resolved.

There's an awful lot hard to trace in these kinds of mysteries.. there's
also a lot of back and forth and he said, she said with each part of your
bandwidth spectrum, but be persistent, keep after it, and you can checklist
each one until this is resolved. Fingerpointing ("it's them, not us...")
will be the norm.

Your slowdown shouldn't occur, but it does, because the DNS is a constantly
changing beast, or more than one beast, but as a whole, it's evolutionary.
Yahoo! or the providers or the campus or middle "Networks" may be having
trouble with some part of the regular, routine refreshing that *must* be
done. Normally, it's part of the hidden underlying maintenance that makes
the Internet robust, alive, and ever-changing. Lots of it is underneath the
blanket, so to speak.. like the refreshing of DNS, cache-cleaning, and log
transfers. It's a mostly hidden world of Jiffy Lube for the Internet.

I suspect what you could be seeing is a Yahoo! change in their DNS, they
would be the most likely suspect in providing some new levels or avenues for
their increbily large e-mail services; with MSN HotMail, they are number 1
and 2 in the world. You aren't reporting these problems in any other types
of access, so it's a best bet.

But, it could be at any point along the way, too. Ask all the parties to see
if their DNS caches can be manually flushed and reset to restore. Something
like that usually will result in re-building the caches, after which the
resolutions are usually much more robust. Most parties don't like to
intervene manually with this system, but it sometimes has to be done.
Stop-flush-re-build. Ask them to do it.

Once the resolutions are not being re-directed, or circulating across the
replaced IPs and DNS IPs, your services should vastly improved.

The reason for the caches is to speed up resolution of IPs, but several
things can bring them to a grinding halt.. too large, corrupted content, old
DNS information that "failed" to update, and so on. Along all of the
Internet, from your desktop to the smallest server today, there are
"caches," stored files and previously used "content" that is served up to
you quicker --because it's in the cache somewhere. They just need refreshing
and tweaks routinely to remain faithful servants to us.

Good luck...

Best,
DrWeb

-- 
P. Michael McCulley aka DrWeb
mailto:drweb at san.rr.com
San Diego, CA 
http://drweb.typepad.com/

Quote of the Moment:
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Friday, March 11, 2005 8:40:09 PM 
 
>-----Original Message-----
>From: web4lib at webjunction.org 
>[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Alicia Abramson
>Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 2:52 PM
>To: Multiple recipients of list
>Subject: [WEB4LIB] Problems with Yahoo Access
>
>Do any other libraries out there who offer public internet 
>access have problems with slow response times when accessing 
>Yahoo sites, especially mail.yahoo.com?  We've been 
>experiencing this for several months here at Berkeley Public 
>Library and haven't been able to find an explanation for it.  
>We host an internal DNS server for internal access to some 
>in-house resources, and we also use our ISP's DNS (SBC) on the 
>TCP/IP configuration for our systems for external name resolution.
>
>Needless to say, it is upsetting to our patrons and to the 
>public service staff who need to deal with the public's frustration. 
>
>It definitely seems to be worse as the day wears on and we 
>have heavier usage of our systems.  We're on a dedicated T1.  
>Our ISP claims that their DNS is not at fault and I can see 
>yahoo sites being resolved correctly in the logs on our own DNS.
>
>If anyone else has experienced something like this and has any 
>ideas to share on how to deal with it, I would appreciate 
>hearing from you.
>
>Thanks,
>
>
>
>Alicia Abramson
>Manager, Information Technology
>Berkeley Public Library
>2090 Kittredge St.
>Berkeley, CA 94704
>510-981-6131
>aabramson at ci.berkeley.ca.us
>
>
>