2 Useful Websites
These 2 sites may be old hat to you but at some point in all of our IT careers we come across websites that we haven’t used before. One such invaluable website for tracking down problems with web hosting, email hosting or other such services is DNSReport.com.
Running your domain through this will give you all the information you need to see what’s working or not working with your domain. The domain name system (DNS) is the way we translate easy to remember domains (ie. www.misguys.com) to the IP address of where that domain resides. How about having to say “goto 67.15.111.132 or whas is 133?” to direct someone to your website? DNSReport.com has helped us numerous times track down problems and return the aggitated network users back to normalacy. Or as close as we can to normalacy that is.
The second useful website is What Is My IP.com How many times have you tried to find out what IP address a remote user is assigned to only to end up ready to go to the remote site and permanently remove the remote user? It’s much easier to say “open Internet Explorer (not that I use IE, but the majority of the users you will deal with do) and type www.whatismyip.com in the address bar.” Usually the next thing you have to say is “no, not the search bar of google or MSN, but the address bar.” Like I said these may be old hat to you but at some time in your distinguished IT career it wasn’t. Somewhere out there there’s some worn out person trying to track down some problems and these two websites are a couple of pieces to getting the puzzle figured out.