Main web site... & egg on my face

[Gavin R. Putland]

Ahem...

On Wed, 18 May 2005 04:41 pm, Tony Shadwick wrote:
> Just out of curiousity...
>
> cat /etc/resolv.conf

That gives the local primary and secondary nameservers of
my ISP, as I believe it should.  The problem was not likely
to be in my machine because I have done a few OS installs
in recent days, whereas www.freebsd.org and the underlying
releng pages, as seen by me, are several months old.

I was familiar with resolv.conf, but not the following:

> nslookup www.freebsd.org

That gives:

    Server:         203.21.20.20
    Address:        203.21.20.20#53

    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name:   www.freebsd.org
    Address: 216.136.204.117

The "Server" is my ISP's primary nameserver.  I don't know
the significance of the #53, but I can report that it has
been consistent for a couple of hours.  When I load
216.136.204.117 into a browser, I get the UP-TO-DATE
FreeBSD home page.

That suggested to me that my ISP uses a proxy which can be
bypassed by typing the real IP address instead of the
mnemonic version thereof.  So I got on a bus, went to an
internet cafe and, having established that the cafe didn't
use the same ISP, typed in www.freebsd.org... and got the
up-to-date version.

So I'll take up the matter with my ISP.  (Or perhaps I
should change to internode.on.net, whose servers apparently
run FreeBSD.)

> :)

Indeed.

With thanks (and apologies, if amusement is outweighed by
annoyance).

Gavin R. Putland.