Change your DNS addresses to google's 4.4.4.4

Comcast had a major DNS crash over the weekend, Web pages would not load or very slow.

Your service provider may have been affected also.

I had no new problems since change to 4.4.4.4 DNS address.

How do you guys figure out these things?

I guess I am a rock, or not enough coffee. How do I set DNS 4.4.4.4 and will it effect anything else? 

Hi. I run DASH.  We have had some very unusual and very bad service interruptions recently.  To all of our customers, I apologize. We are working hard to resolve, and I will post here when we are back up for business (soon!!!)

 

We have had two separate issues hit us at the same time.  The first is due to some internal inefficiencies in our code that became exposed because of our increased user traffic.  We have implemented some corrections, and we are working on more which we hope will end up making DASH faster overall.

 

The second issue has to do with the inner-workings of the Internet. Not to bore you with all of the details, but there is a giant registry of all of the web addresses in the world. There are often several companies involved in a web site, and if one of them drops the ball, you are cooked.

 

Turns out one of the companies messed up part of our registration.  So, for the past 16 hours, our servers have been happily up and running, but no one could see them.  Fixing this problem (which we have now by replacing that company that dropped the ball) takes hours and hours to take effect because the new registration information has to get passed around to a bunch of registry servers throughout the world.  Anyway, we should be accessible to everyone in a few hours, hopefully.

 

I will post here when we are up and running.  And thanks again for the tremendous support everyone shows us in the model train community.

WE'RE BACK!

 

All I can say about this latest issue we have had is to offer this analogy.  When you are fully expecting and wanting your train to take the mountain route through your layout, and instead someone inadvertently switched the track to the cityside route.  Only too late do you see that you are on the wrong track!  And, you have to wait until your train makes that pass again to get it on the right track.

 

That's sort of what happened with us.  I'll spare you the technical details, but after lots of typing a bunch of techy things into many screens, WE'RE BACK.

 

Looks like it is down again.

 

Your request could not be processed because an error occurred contacting the DNS server.

Well, that stinks.  I know for most people in the U.S., the site is up.  I actually see a count of the users online.  But, the way the DNS propagates through the registry, it can be spotty but should be completely done in 24 hours globally.  I'm sorry that you are having issues, and all I can say is try again a little later please.  Most of the auctions tonight will be closing starting at 9pm.

It's up fine to me.

 

You need to clear/flush the DNS cache on your computer.  Otherwise it will continue to use the bad info until it times out - which could be days.

 

A Google search for DNS cache clearing will tell you how to do it for your particular system.

Thanks rdunniii!

 

- Bill

Thank you for the information, but I still cannot connect after clearing the DNS cache.

I've tried on all devices, ipads, iphones, pc's, no luck.  I even recruited my wife into the testing on her devices.  

 

Please know that my main interest in providing you feedback is because looking through the auctions in O, N and Z scale is a favorite pasttime.  Not to mention I haven't missed a single O auction in the last 5 years.  

 

Not having it has been a real bummer. 

Still not getting it.

 

Oops! Internet Explorer could not find collector-modeltrains.com

Try reloading: collector-­modeltrains.­com

Hey Bill, I've started getting final payment reminders for items I won i. The last 2 O auctions.  Since I can't login I've not been able to process Paypal pay ent.  can you intervene please so my winnings to go back into auction?  Thanks!

Have you tried a different browser?  I have both Safari and Firefox on my mac specifically because there are sites that come and go on one or the other from time to time:  particularly secure connections that just come up blank; really annoying.

I just logged in using Safari. No problem. Accessed my account and now I am looking at 0 Modern auctions. 

I am getting in just fine at the time of this post via MacBook Pro and the latest Firefox.

 

I tried Safari and got in as well.

The problem is not with different web browsers or computers.  It is with different Internet Service Providers.  It works fine on my mobile network on my phone but not on my home internet connection.  There is not much that can be done until your ISP gets there DNS settings corrected.  I missed out on Sunday nights O'gauge auctions because of the problem.  The problem started for me then.

I got an error message when I tried to access my account and the sale pages I had marked during the Sunday auction. I was unable to bid because the pages wouldn't come up. I was able to get in the next day. Sounds like the DNS problem. 

If you want to avoid computer "Chaos", Stay away from Google DNS

See link below to understand the issues.

https://developers.google.com/...ublic-dns/docs/using

Good Luck - Gary

  Click DNS Screen Shot, to enlarge - On this topic 

Maybe time to find a more reliable server?

Thank you for this information, you are absolutely correct, it is the ISP.

 

Cellular network is fine, laptop is not.

I hope that people have now been able to get back to DASH.  It takes 24-48 hours sometimes for the DNS settings to propagate.  If that still isn't working, then taking the steps suggested by others here on the forum to clear your DNS cache should do the work.

 

Once you are all online, I hope you enjoy the experience.  While we've been "in the shop", we've been able to roll-out some performance improvements that are pretty significant.  There still may be a few kinks for us to work out, but I am sure you will enjoy being on DASH even more with these speed-ups.

 

 

- Bill

I did a couple of trace routes to the first Google DNS server - 13 hops.
It is 8 hops to my ISP's DNS server.

I am not a network engineer, still I am under the impression that less hops is better (faster response)

I'm not a network engineer either.  The performance gains are showing up as in the 5x to 10x range, and they really aren't related to the DNS issues.  They are fundamental platform improvements.  Thanks for checking and your support in making DASH better.  We love to get ideas for improvements too, so if anyone has ideas on how we could improve things from the catalog, to collection management, to sharing, to shopping, to selling, etc., we'd love to know.  Click on Contact Us and shoot us a note.  We can't do everything, but we certainly can always improve.

 

- Bill

Still not working in ohio?


       

If you are sill having issues, try getting to the website on your phone's cellular network.

 

Like KJSTRAINS said earlier it is an ISP - Internet Service Provider issue.  Until the DNS gets propagated to your ISP, it will not work, you need to try another one.

 

I was only able to get to the site on my phone, but last night I was able to get to the site on all my devices. 

I can bring up the site without any problems, but I sure haven't noticed any performance improvements. Page loading is still S  L  O  W.

We will keep studying it, but right now our metrics are showing a 3-5x page load improvement in O Modern from just a few days ago.  We'll keep evaluating and tuning.  Thanks for the feedback.

 

- Bill

Southwest Hiawatha, thanks for your comment.  I am seeing that browsing within a seller store (for example the Trainz store) isn't showing the performance gains we've achieved when browsing all of the listings.  We are looking into that and will be addressing.  Thanks for pointing it out to us, and in the meantime, you can browse the listings outside of a store to get the faster experience.

 

- Bill

Bill,

 

Glad to see ya'll are back up & running!

 

As a side question for you...

 

How come while on your auction site if I search for let's say 'K-Line reefer', the first hit is get is a K-Line reefer followed by five Walther's reefers, a Marklin reefer, AF by Lionel reefer then some more K-Line reefers???

 

Boolean searches seem to make things worst as does quoting search terms.  I guess I need an education in how your search function works...

 

Please enlighten us!

 

Best,

Dave

Hi Dave.  (Like your "re-tired" signature  :-))

 

Getting super good results on searches is pretty darned hard, and unfortunately we don't have literally the team of hundreds of engineers and PhDs that Google has to refine ours.  But, what we do is actually pretty interesting.

 

We take the search string components and look for matches according to a weighted evaluation looking at other item names as well as parts of the taxonomy.  We have looked at this approach across a bunch of the search strings that our users have actually typed in to conclude that in general, this approach works best.  We err on the side of showing you too much versus constraining it too much, simply because it can be more frustrating to get a null result (and have to figure out how to adjust the search string to get some results) than wade through some extra peripherally-relevant results.  

 

As with most things, I'm sure we can improve and as we continue to grow, we will continue to invest to refine all of the experience.

 

Thanks again for your question and feedback.

 

- Bill

 

Thanks for the quick reply Bill.

 

Contact me off-line and I'll share some thoughts with you.  My email is in my profile.

 

Best,

Dave

I did some browsing on the site today and it was much faster than before. Page loading times were normal rather than the long wait as before. Thanks for fixing it.