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A few people have reported problems getting to the website or that the website was down. The website was not down, but the problem is there is some kind of rogue server out there propagating invalid IP address information for the website. This is/was getting cached by some of the ISP providers (Spint, Comcast, Version, etc) and as such you may have been unable to reach the website.

DNS is what takes the "packardinfo.com" name and converts that into a numerical address that computers use on the internet. The ISP cache this information for 24hrs at a time to help speed up network connections. So if they store an invalid value, then you cant get to the website until they "refresh" again with the correct value.

Jim had this problem awhile back where his provider always was displaying the wrong IP address for the website. The solution there was to add the real address to his local DNS table on his wireless router so it wont depend on the ISP dns lookup.

My webhosting provider is forcing out an update that should hopefully fix it, but it may take up to 48hrs to propagate.

When I have encountered this problem on my side I switched my DNS host in my computer network setting from the automatically ISP provided one to OpenDNS.org free one at 208.67.222.222.

Just as a quick update, when I checked at the start about 40% of the major ISP's around the world were reporting the wrong IP address for my website. I just checked again and that has dropped to about 15% now. So the propagation is happening, but may take up to 36 hours before it is fully done.

Thanks

Big Kev rocks! He is awesome and so very helpful; ALWAYS!

Although it would be better explained in English rather that Greek :)

Whew, thank the stars that's over! I couldn't have held my breath much longer!

Upon last check, 95% of the reporting ISP providers are now showing the correct IP Address for the website.

Phil -

At the very least, this would be like someone hacking the telco's switchboards and routing all incoming calls for P'Info to a third party phone number. However, I'm not sure whether these pirates are simply hoping to sell callers something they don't want or trying to skim their info.

Personally, I'd like to see the day when there's a $$$ bounty on spammers and malicious hackers. Such pursuit could be a great fodder for NBC's Dateline or even a new cable TV show.

The German observation post reports, that Packardinfo becomes visible again but Keith still seem to be in the dark.

Whatever happened in cyberspace.......thanks BigKev for taking care of all such things. Much appreciated.

I've seen a couple people report virus issues or warnings related to visiting the website. If you ware seeing anything, then has to be something bad cached on your computer. Last week there was a rogue website that was sending out bad DNS entry info that was causing ISPs to send people to a different website other that mine. That is where the source of any infection must have came from, and not here. This unfortunately was external to me, and I had that rouge website suspended and the DNS entries corrected and repropogated. Basically, this was like someone at the phone company misrouting your phone number to a physically different phone.

I done several exhausted virus scans of all the files on my website and also done several checks with Google Safe Surfing and McAfee to double check everything through the browser experience and no viruses, malware or suspicious files were detected.

If you are still getting a problem, then something is still bad or cached on your computer or local router that is misdirecting your internet requests to a bad page. Both www.packardinfo.com and packardinfo.com should resolve via DNS to IP address: 199.195.140.76, if they don't, then bad DNS info is still being cached on your local computer or home internet router and will need to be flushed.

Rest assured I take this type of thing very seriously and have multiple levels of virus protection in place on the website. But obviously if ISPs were mistakenly sending people to the wrong physical website, then that is beyond anything I could protect you from. I do recommend everyone have in place some type of Virus/Malware software with integrated browser protection if you dont, as another line of defense against any internet threat that is lurking out there.

Best Regards,

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