It has been a tough week for the company that we buy our internet from! They lost several pieces of key equipment in the thunderstorms this week. And, this evening, I've just learned that they have lost power to part of their facilities.

At this point, around 8:45 PM, one of their name servers is not responding. Unfortunately, it is the name server that we use for our primary "domain name lookup". In other words, when you type "google.com", a domain name server has to turn it into an "IP" address (for instance, 64.233.167.99). Without the domain name server, requests for web sites can not be resolved to IP address and the internet doesn't work! (However, if you happen to know the IP address of the site you want, you can type that into the address line and get to the server.)

They are working on the problem. They will hopefully have it fixed soon.

UPDATE 8/26/2007 7:25 AM: At some point during the night, the domain name server came back on line so we should be back up. I talked with my buddy last night and we have a new item on our list: We are going to set up our own domain name server so that we can dynamically route our domain name requests to any server that we want. That way, if this happens again, we can flip a switch on our side and route to a domain name server that is working.

The odd thing about the problem last night is that there is already redundancy built into the normal approach to domain name lookups. Typically, each computer on the network will have the addresses of two domain name servers. If it cannot contact the first, it will switch to the second. But in this case our "first" server wasn't really down, it was just taking the requests and then going to lunch! ;-)

Still, once we have our own domain name server, that should protect us from this kind of thing causing us a problem in the future.

Sorry for the inconvenience.