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Date:	Sun, 14 Aug 2005 12:29:59 PDT7
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: News Server Question, etc.

Content Type: text/plain

J R FOX wrote:
>
> What is your preferred WHOIS, for the _various types_
> of lookups you ever need to do ?

Better-Whois. http://www.betterwhois.com/

Bob uses an OS/2 software tool ("John's WhoIs" or somesuch).

> Can you Ping a news server

The term "server" is used indiscriminately for two entirely different
things -- the piece of software which is doing the server work, and the
hardware box on which the software server resides. For example, the
SCOUG server is a hardware box belonging to Tony. On that box are
several software servers -- INetMail is the mail server, Apache is the
web (http) server, Penguin is the FTP server. Each of the software
servers listens for its own packets and only acts on its own packets.

There is also a piece of software called a "TCP/IP stack". This is the
software that is _directly_ connected to your network card. The TCP/IP
stack takes packets from the network, looks at the "port number" they
are addressed to, and sends the packet to the server which has
registered itself for that port. For example, port 80 is http stuff.
If a packet comes in from the Internet addressed for port 80, the TCP/IP
stack software says "in my table there is a program called Apache which
said it was to receive all port 80 packets" and the TCP/IP stack then
sends that packet to Apache.

Ping goes to the TCP/IP stack on the machine. It doesn't have a port
number. The TCP/IP stack sends back the response, not any of the server
software on the machine.

So if you Ping a machine and there is no response, the packets aren't
getting to the machine (or the machine is off or has trapped out). If
you successfully Ping a machine then you know it is running *but* you do
not know if any particular software server is running. Another
example: If I shut down Apache (http) on the SCOUG server then I can
still Ping the machine successfully (and I can send mail list messages
to it and I can FTP to it) but I cannot web surf to the SCOUG web pages.

No, you cannot Ping a news server. You can only Ping the TCP/IP stack
on the machine which is running the news server.

You should *also* run TRACERTE ("traceroute") to see if your packets are
actually getting to the machine. TraceRoute sends back a response from
every router along the route, thus you know which routers your packets
are going through.

Run this command on your machine:

tracerte news.la.sbcglobal.net

On my machine it got to 66.10.17.2 and no further:

14 66.10.17.2 (66.10.17.2) 109 ms 109 ms 102 ms
15 * * *

If you send your tracerte output to SBC it might help them figure out
what is wrong.

- Peter

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