Game down (for some)

The game appears to be experiencing intermittent issues this morning.

So far we've established that this issue does not happen to everyone every time. We're looking deeper and we'll keep you posted when we know more.

As announced above we're experiencing intermittent connection issues. We have some more information for you guys now:

The problem lies with our DNS provider, mydomain.com. It's so severe that all their named servers also seem to be down intermittently, or returning bogus results when not. We're clearly not alone - their online control panel appears to be swamped with people trying to get in to repair things

We can't yet see any official statement from them anywhere on their site.

In the meantime, we're monitoring the situation, and looking into alternative DNS providers, although the switchover would also take a while (the current estimate is 5-7 days so we're not pursuing this just yet).

So far it seems we'll just have to wait it out.

If any of you guys are curious you can run this command line to illustrate the problem:

C:\Windows\system32>nslookup utopia-game.com ns1.mydomain.com

You should see the request timing out.

There is a workaround for this. If you use the intructions at http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tuto...utorial51.html to find and edit your hosts file this should override DNS for utopia-game.com.

For utopia, the entry you need is:
174.129.4.172 utopia-game.com

Important: this is a temporary measure, and you should remove this line as soon as the current DNS trouble passes. Also, we take no responsibility for any damage made to your computer if you make these alterations.

In other words - if you're really, really having problems connecting and you simply have to - you can try this. Just be aware it's not ideal.

As always we'll keep you posted as soon as we have more information.

Another workaround that we're seeing on the boards:

If you try http://174.129.4.172/shared/ you may find that you can access the game as normal.

Some of you may experience no issues at all and this is (I've been informed) because our devs use google's DNS servers which have got the working versions of the DNS entries cached. So everything is still working for some.

We don't know if they'll keep them cached until the originals start working again however. If you are having no problems but suddenly you experience these connection issues it's probably worth trying out the workarounds here.

Thanks.

Annnd it looks like it's fixed.

Sean is mailing mydomain.com seeking a full report and if any information in the report or stemming from the report needs to be shared (i.e. will effect you guys as users), we'll share it with you.

Working backwards through our own tests ns1.mydomain.com is still timing out.

So ns1.mydomain.com is down but it's backed up by ns2.mydomain.com and ns4.mydomain.com. These get used automatically and seem fine.

What this means is that there are still some issues with mydomain.com - we hope they'll have them under control asap but in the meantime (and in contrast to when the problem first emerged) the backups seem to be keeping things running just fine for now.

We hope that the end users (you) won't notice any further connection issues.

We are still receiving reports of issues with the dns. So far the workarounds specifically http://174.129.4.172/shared/ are still viable.

There is little we can do for the moment except wait on mydomain.com.

Thanks for your patience.