When I had the problem to log in the site was more a server problem with Firefox.
I guess is/are the server/s the main reason we are not able to come into the homepage.
No? :thinking:
When you go to a web page there is not just one server involved, there are at least two involved.
The internet works based off IP addresses, but IP addresses are not very human-friendly, so, we layered a human-friendly naming system on top of them using the Domain Name System, or DNS. When you type
www.gayheaven.org into your browser, the first thing your computer has to do is ask it's DNS server to find out what IP address that name belongs to. Only after it gets that answer can it even try to contact the web server where
www.gayheaven.com is actually located.
The reason I say at least two is that DNS name resolution (going from name to IP address) is a complex process.
There are two kinds of DNS servers, those that hold answers, and those that search for answers. They are called authoritative name servers and resolving name servers or just resolvers.
Your home router acts as a resolver for all the computers in your network, but it does so in a dumb way, it simply passes all queries on to your ISP's resolver, and that resolver does the real work.
So how does a resolver find the right authoritative server to get the IP address of a domain name? Well - it's a hierarchical process, with the root name servers acting as the anchor into the chain. The IP addresses of this small collection of servers (more than 10 less than 100) are stored inside a confituration file inside DNS resolvers. Searches for DNS names start there. Those root servers contain the list of authoritative servers that control the top-level domain like .com, .org, .edu, .gov, .ie, .be, .de, .uk etc.. Each of those TLDs will have a list of servers that know about domains within them. So, first you ask the root servers who is responsible for all of .org, then you ask the .org server which authoritative servers have the information for gayheaven.org, and then you can ask those servers what the IP address is any address ending in gayheaven.org.
So - to get an answer for the IP address that matches this site there are all the following servers involved: your router, your ISP's DNS resolver, the root DNS servers, the .org DNS servers, and finally the gayheaven.org DNS servers. This is clearly a big job, so, it can't be done every single time someone wants to load a page on this site. Hence, the DNS protocol allows for caching of results. When a DNS resolver gets an answer from an authoritative server for the domain they are trying to resolve that answer doesn't only contain the IP address, but also a Time To Live or TTL value, which is the number of seconds the result can be cached before having to be fetched again. To save the loads on their servers, many places set long TTLs of not seconds or hours, but days. As well as answers being cached, the lack of an answer is also cached. If the .org name server tells your ISPs resolver that there is no such domain as gayheaven.org, your ISPs resolver will cache that with the TTL the .org server gave for the negative answer.
I need to point out that these caches are everywhere! Your computer keeps a cache, your router keeps a cache, your ISP keeps a cache, the .org servers keep a cache, there are caches at all stages. Not all caches stricktly obey the TTL they get, so sometimes you have servers that will only ever update after 48 hours regardless of the TTL, or you may have servers that always refresh their cache after an hour. It's up to the administrators of DNS resolvers to choose how they want to manage their cache. It's good manners to respect TTLs, but you should look at them as a request, not a guarantee.
What does all this mean - changes, as well as temporary errors spread around the internet slowly and at varying rates for people in different parts of the world using different resolvers. When DNS goes wrong, it takes days to iron itself out.
I hope that clarifies things for those of you who are curious as to what all this DNS stuff is about. Also - next time you are browsing, watch the bar a the bottom of your screen, you'll often see it saying things like 'resolving
www.gayheave.org' or 'looking up
www.gayheaven.org', before it changes to 'connecting to
www.gayheaven.org' and then 'transferring data from
www.gayheaven.org'. That first step, the looking up or resolving step, that's the DNS step.
B.
