<p>will not load on computers here at Murray State University in West Kentucky. Our test center links to it for test registration, etc. I called CB’s techs, no problems at their website.</p>
<p>My request: Could some of you in various distant locales just visit</p>
<p>for a moment and let me know if the page loaded okay? Our techs are stumped, several other users locally with other ISP’s can’t reach it either so I don’t think it’s a local DNS issue. Pinging didn’t make one jump.</p>
<p>The first 5-10 who do this, please post your success or failure and a general geographic identifier (Pacific Northwest, North East, etc.) No need for more than that.</p>
<p>I don’t know if this will help our techs but it sounds like a problem just upstream of us (although why we can get to ets.org and any other site and not collegeboard.com is baffling)</p>
<p>Our tech told me that it’s not a firewall issue on this end - I asked, jokingly, if it might be in a list of porn sites blocked to university computers. If you would prefer to private email me, I’m <a href=“mailto:bill.allbritten@murraystate.edu”>bill.allbritten@murraystate.edu</a></p>
<p>Just logged into <a href=“http://www.collegeboard.com%5B/url%5D”>www.collegeboard.com</a> from Fort Wayne, IN with no problem. (on a T1 connection).</p>
<p>Loaded fine in the Southeast, but it seemed slow. Could it be that there are test results coming out today, causing unusual demand on the site and taxing its servers?</p>
<p>The most likely is a router issue - if a router is out or overloaded somewhere between your servers & theirs, that would cause a slowdown. The way to find that would be to ping or do a traceroute from the Murray State computers - the techs should know how to do that.</p>
<p>It could also be a DNS problem. “DNS” is the internet system that connects up the real, numerical address of a domain with the domain name. Every web site has designated “nameservers” that have that information stored - they are the pointers that tell the browser where to go. The problem is, to save time, computers do not “check” the official DNS every time they look up the web site - rather, they check the nearest DNS server that has a copy of the records they are looking for. If there is a mistake or misconfiguration in one of those, it can take many hours for that to clear. Sometimes the DNS server that is causing the problem is one associated with the local network.</p>
<p>The reason ets.org might load fine while collegeboard.com won’t is that the sites are on different servers in different cities. ETS.org is on a server in Princeton NJ. The College Board site is hosted on an a server in New York. (Though NY is close to NJ, the routing may be very different)</p>
<p>Actually, I get timeouts when I try to do a traceroute or ping to the college board site - even though I get a very fast response when I go to the site itself, including doing things like logging in to my daughter’s account. I’m not sure why that would be, but my best guess is that there is a DNS problem involving the Collegeboard’s nameserver. The DNS is probably cached on my ISP’s system, since I use a major ISP and Collegeboard is very popular (lots of other users going there) – but maybe not so with the Murray State computers. Additional evidence to support that theory is that I ALSO get a timeout on a ping of the collegeboard.com primary nameserver, though that is not the case with their secondary nameserver. </p>
<p>So I think the problem is probably on the collegeboard end of things - however, if this is only happening on one computer, I would suggest (1) clearing the browser cache, shutting down the browser entirely, then reopening the browser and trying again; (2) try a different browser: if you are accessing via Internet Explorer, try Firefox instead.</p>