While it's tremendously exciting to see Victoria finally hove into view, baring her tantalizing secrets to our searching eyes one little bit at a time, I have to say that, well, it's just not the same without Bob Shaw here to share it with us.

If anyone out there is in general contact with Bob, tell him that some of us miss him and wish he was here to share this experience with us...



-the other Doug

I've done everything I possibly can to try and help Bob get back into the forum. I am 99.999% convinced that the problem lies with NTL ( his ISP ) rather than with the forum host.

Meanwhile - here's a few images he sent through via ngunn

Oh, I understand, Doug -- no blame goes out to you or the Forum. It's just that I found in Bob something of a kindred spirit, here, and it's just not as *fun* getting to Victoria with him not here.

Don't worry, I'll get over it...

-the other Doug

Was looking for the thread where the troubleshooting steps were kindof listed, can't find it so sorry about this question.

Has he tried using a public proxy server to try and bypass his ISP problems? Not sure if it will work, ust a thought.

If anyone is in touch with him it might be worth his while just downloading and using something like Torpark just so he can access UMSF.
It's a repackaged portable Firefox build that includes TOR anonymising proxy\routing by default - it will get him past any issues that are being caused by the UMSF host and NTL getting in a fight.

If someone can just give him a huge hug from me...

Doug, thanks for posting Bob's images. He knows he's greatly missed. In his email to me he wrote "I'll be back, honest - still fighting NTL!"

I'm trying out NTL's connectivity offering at the moment since it is waay cheaper than my existing BB connection and free for a couple of months.
Obviously given Bob's issues my first test was to try to connect to here. No joy at all - neither Firefox or IE get anything - site cannot be found. Torpark improves the problem significantly as it allows me to resolve the name and route to here using the TOR network but it is a far from ideal situation as it is very slow.

So some additional testing - I can't connect via browser can't ping, can't tracert and can't nslookup. With nslookup for example I get this:
C:\joe\portable\Torpark>nslookup www.unmannedspaceflight.com
...
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to UnKnown timed-out

So the problem begins with NTL's DNS but it might be more serious. Let's fix that first.

OK Go to an online nslookup and find the ipaddress for www.unmannedspaceflight.com - 72.9.234.170.
I can ping and Tracert to that so that looks promising. Just punching it into the browser brings me to the apache root page on the host so that's no good.

OK so I now go back to my roots a bit and edit my hosts file ( c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts ) and add the following line ot the end of the file.
72.9.234.170 www.unmannedspaceflight.com
Save it and then reopen Firefox. Bingo. We have a connection.

It's only a temporary workaround and I will be hammering on NTL's tech support to resolve this now that I have an exact root cause but does someone who has Bob's e-mail address want to get him to try the following cos should work?. That's assuming he's on a Windows machine of some type - if he's on Linux or a Mac then some other volunteer will have to direct him to the hosts file.

I've posted your message onto the UMSF Yahoo backup which I know Bob subscribes to.

genius helvick! let's hope it works for bob too....

Reply from Bob.

Yeah I picked up his reply. I'll follow up with him on the yahoo groups site and see if we can make any progress. Oh well.