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[Weaver]

Talking about staring networking errors, in various threads.

The latest weirdness was that Safari refused to go to the url      https://www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/faclair/sbg/lorg.php

Now when I started digging into this, I tried looking at the domain name www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk and was intending to ping it and trace route it, but the diagnosis tool app I used just came straight back with 'general failure' whatever on earth that might mean, whether the dns server could not be reached or whether the dns server was successfully reached but returned no A record answer, or whether DNS succeeded and came up with an A record but then an attempt to talk to that address failed somehow. It just seemed to be confined to that one domain name or one ip address. Switching off/on of the wireless NIC fixed things as it usually does.

[burakkucat]

I don't know if any of the following is a help but I seem to recall that site behaving oddly in the past.

Code: [Select]

[Duo2 ~]$ host -a www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk
Trying "www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 58751
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk. 7199 IN CNAME tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk.

Received 56 bytes from 8.8.8.8#53 in 71 ms
[Duo2 ~]$ whois -a www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk
[Querying whois.ja.net]
[whois.ja.net]

No such domain www2.smo.uhi.ac.uk

[Duo2 ~]$ host -a tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk
Trying "tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 61411
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk. 7199 IN A 194.35.194.95

Received 53 bytes from 8.8.8.8#53 in 99 ms
[Duo2 ~]$ whois -a tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk
[Querying whois.ja.net]
[whois.ja.net]

No such domain tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk

[Duo2 ~]$ host -a 194.35.194.95
Trying "95.194.35.194.in-addr.arpa"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 21220
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;95.194.35.194.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:
95.194.35.194.in-addr.arpa. 21599 IN PTR tarbh.smo.uhi.ac.uk.

Received 77 bytes from 8.8.8.8#53 in 76 ms
[Duo2 ~]$ ping -c1 194.35.194.95
PING 194.35.194.95 (194.35.194.95) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 194.35.194.95 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 10000ms

[Duo2 ~]$


[Weaver]

So ja.net does not know the CNAME?

smo.uhi.ac.uk is a Gàidhlig-language (100% Gàidhlig-medium of instruction) college. As far as I am aware, it is the only Celtic-language tertiary education institution that is 100% Celtic language and no English + no French as the medium of instruction throughout the whole institution. There are departments where say Irish and Welsh is used extensively but not the entire institution.

[The host tarbh [t̪ʰaɾav] used to be, iirc, maybe still is, a server which was originally a Sun unix box originally on a friend of mine's desk. Amongst other things it is or was an http server which allows you to look up words in various dictionaries including an English to Gàidhlig dictionary and the reverse.]

I know plenty of people who work there, although some of them will have retired. It is twenty years since I was a full time student there. I should perhaps ask some of them about this.

OOPS 

I have just noticed that the query relating to tarbh was a whois not a dns lookup, so I had misunderstood.

The word tarbh [t̪ʰaɾav] (possibly almost stressed on the second syllable) means bull. The logo for the college is taken from a pictish bull symbol at Burghead on the East Coast. (Kind of ironic for a Gàidhlig-language college, since the Picts were the people who did not speak Gàidhlig.)

Compare Latin taurus but in Pre-Proto-Celtic the wr got swapped around giving rw in ProtoCeltic *tarwos so eg. actual Gaulish taruos.