The site is, www.royalcaribbeanfan.com

A user in France reports a "Forbidden" You don't have permission to access /rcifan01 on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found Error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Another user in the UK mailed her ISP. She's not a techie. In her words:

"Bad news. It's happened again! I went to it after you'd approved my membership to the forum and got that forbidden message. So I checked the DNS server numbers (which my ISP had given me) and it isn't working. I'm going to email them again."

She could see it at one point, signed-up, was approved by me, and saw it shortly afterwards. Now she can't access it again.

The site is hosted in a subdomain of Cruiseaficionados.com. It is up and operational, works great. At least one user in the UK can access without much issue. Everybody I am aware of, in the U.S. seems to have zero issues accessing it.

I'm lost. I can't do tech support for some of these people, but I would like to have some idea if this has happened to others, and what I might try to tell these people.

I'm in the UK and I can access your site. I'm not sure what the problem is but it appears to be something to do with the users ISP in my opinion.

One of my customers had a problem accessing his own site a while ago - this was later resolved. I believe that was an ISP issue with nameservers or something or other.

Yes, my guess is nameservers. It certainly sounds like there's something that some ISP's DNS servers don't like which is why it's an "intermittent" problem.

I'll be back in a little while after I've investigated more.

Ok, after thinking about it more then at least some of this doesn't sound like it's DNS related.

Originally Posted by NWLB.net

A user in France reports a "Forbidden" You don't have permission to access /rcifan01 on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found Error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Does rcifan01 mean anything to you - i.e. is that a path which exists on your server, and/or have you recently changed the nameservers/server for your domain, where that rcifan01 path existed on the old server perhaps?

Originally Posted by NWLB.net

Another user in the UK mailed her ISP. She's not a techie. In her words:

"Bad news. It's happened again! I went to it after you'd approved my membership to the forum and got that forbidden message. So I checked the DNS server numbers (which my ISP had given me) and it isn't working. I'm going to email them again."

She could see it at one point, signed-up, was approved by me, and saw it shortly afterwards. Now she can't access it again.

This bit does sound like it's perhaps DNS related - but if she's getting 403 forbidden she's obviously resolving the domain to something...

Originally Posted by NWLB.net

The site is hosted in a subdomain of Cruiseaficionados.com.

Can these users who are having problems access this domain but not the other? Or are both affected?

Ruling out DNS is fairly easy. Get them to open up a command prompt and type:

nslookup www.royalcaribbeanfan.com

(followed by enter)

They should see something like:

Server: resolver1.opendns.com
Address: 208.67.222.222

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: royalcaribbeanfan.com
Address: 69.73.139.20
Aliases: www.royalcaribbeanfan.com

The first bit isn't of interest so much - it's just about the DNS server they're using (in my case, opendns). The last part is what you're interested in - you should basically make sure that everyone gets the same IP address as that.

If someone gets a different IP, or some error message saying "non-existant domain" or similar then you know that DNS is the problem.

The other thing to check here is that since people are reporting 403 error messages, what is reported in your error_log on the server? If they're hitting the correct server, you should see a fair few 403 errors and that might shed some more light on what's going on.

The /rcifan01 is a folder under the subdomain in which the site is hosted.

Strictly speaking, the real address, which isn’t working for him either, is:

http://www.royalcaribbeanfan.cruisea...s.com/rcifan01

Even this direct address doesn’t seem to work.

There is a Joomla installation based in that folder.

The most recent changes I made, were to point the Godaddy to the hosts DNS servers. The host uses Cpanel, and I established a multi-hosted relationship for royalcaribbeanfan.com. In-turn, I pointed a redirect for incoming traffic to the above noted address.

It works fine here in the U.S. Few people seem to have any issue at all. To date, the only people with issues are a lady in the UK and a fella in France. The former was able to get through at one point, then as noted, could not later.

Its being noted by another friend in the UK, that the issue of ISP cache’ing may be in play here. That is something a bit new to my understanding of how these things work.

Do you mean to tell me, that some LAME, discount ISP in France and the UK, are cache’ing my site, and thus, as my people try to access it, the error isn’t showing on my local access, or on my error logs, because it is in fact only taking place between an out of date image of the site on a UK server?

Or is this meaning to say that ISP are keeping local versions of the master DNS data, which I personally had thought was only on the 13 or so main routers, and was updated by way of registration companies like Godaddy?

Until yesterday, I thought all the worry of cache had to do with people and their browsers. Now that you make mention of it in this context, I completely understand how and why this is an issue. I just can’t understand the purpose behind it being done.

The issue had been resolved, unless this is comment on the previous posts.

Turned out to be ISP cache on the flip side of the pond. After the DNS changes had populated fully, it went away.

Now my Host is having server issues while they make upgrades to their network.

It is always something.

As this issue is resolved, the thread will be closed.

Whym