[babalu1997]

folks i had been connecting to a game server for nearly a year, now using 2 computers and 2 different connections, i cannot connect at all, i am not behind a firewall, only the windows one



my web seems to go other places, but when i get to this particular website, i get dns errors message, or sometimes i get there

i saw some instructions to run a ping under the dos prompt, how in the world do i get to the dos prompt?

They also say something abiut a port number, how do i set my port number?

i am on windows xp, and i am a naive computer user.

thanks

[kenberg]

Babs, I am also naive. But a thought or two.


1. If you are trying this with two different computers, I would guess that their website is having problems and you have to wait until they solve them.

2. I have had good luck solving problems by un-istalling and re-installing. I first learned this with cars, half a century ago. I would take things apart, change nothing, put them back together and problems would disappear. I never understood this, it just worked.

3. I did recently do some stuff with my XP. Some of it took some time. If the site doesn't undergo a resurrection and you want some details, I can provide them.

4. (Relevant to 3). I really don't much know a ping from a pong, so if someone else gives you advice, I recommend you go with their thoughts.

[blackshoe]

In XP: Start menu => Command Prompt. If it's not there, Start menu => All Programs => Accessories => Command Prompt. You will get a window with a black background, and something like C:\Documents and Settings\myComputer> At this prompt, type ping xxx, where xxx is either a url (msn.com, apple.com) or an IP address (10.0.1.5). If it's working correctly, you should get some statistics about round trip time. Or you'll get something like "request timed out". If there's a dns problem, and you specified a url, you're likely to get some message about "unable to resolve address" or some such.

It's rarely going to be a port number problem, especially if it had been working.

Not sure what you would uninstall and reinstall in this case. It does sound like the problem is on their end (dns problems typically indicate that some dns servers are down or otherwise inaccessible, or that the site owner forget to renew his dns registration.

"i am not behind a firewall, only the windows one". "I am not drunk, ossifer, I only had tee martooni's".

[fred]

The company that hosts our servers had some technical problems yesterday. This is not my area of expertise, but it sounds like the issues you experienced are a direct result of these problems.

In theory everything is fixed now, but it may take another several hours before the fix is propagated throughout the world. You might be able to speed things up for yourself by closing all of your browser windows, opening a new browser, and clearing your browser cache before you try using BBO again.

Sorry about this inconvenience, but it was unfortunately beyond our control.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[kenberg]

From the phrasing, I assumed the game site in this instance was not bbo. But I took interest in Fred's response. Yesterday (playing on a Windows 7 with downloaded software) I found the cards were slowly crawling from hand to table. So I did my un-install and re-install bit and then it worked fine. Perhaps just a co-incidence of timing, but it is remarkable how often this seems to solve a problem for me.

[Aberlour10]

I wondered at the afternoon because as I tried to reach the forums through >>> www.bridgebase.com >>> Related links >>>> Discussion boards... I got x times to a strange site with smthg about DNS and a lot of german advertising. You won Audi etc blabla bla

But, the direct link to forums worked all the time normal.

[mycroft]

Blackshoe, yet another way to get command prompt is Start->Run->type "cmd" in the box. That's frequently faster than trying to find where MS has hidden the stupid menu item.

(of course, from this unix admin's perspective, the proper way to get this is Start->Cygwin->Cygwin bash shell. I realize this will only work on machines I've touched, though)

[blackshoe]

Heh. Yeah, That works too.

[barmar]

Another useful tool when you can't get to a particular web site is http://www.downforev...neorjustme.com.