[Tfug] unreachable hosts

[christopher floess]

Hi everyone, this is kind of off topic, but I thought some of you might be
up for the challenge.

I have a couple of friends who buy their music through itunes. Then one day,
they weren't able to connect to the sight any more. As they started to
trouble shoot it, Apple told them that they have to be able to reach to
domain names (phobos.apple.com and phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net), which
they suggested might be being blocked by their firewall. They have norton
internet security and antivirus,
and right about this time, they got me involved with it. Now, as far
as I could tell, they
disabled everything correctly, and we also checked to make sure that their
windows firewall was disabled. So the next think I did tried was checking to
see if the domain name led to a valid IP address. I started out at a website
that offered a domain name to ip conversion
http://www.hcidata.info/host2ip.cgi . Here are the results

Host Name : phobos.apple.com
IP Address : 17.250.236.65
Location : United States

Host Name : phobos.apple.com
IP Address : 17.250.236.65
Location : United States

Clearly the second address is a problem. I decided to run
tracert (I think it's the windows equivalent to 'traceroute') from their
machine:

Tracing route to phobos.apple.com [17.250.236.65]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms 68.0.128.45
3 11 ms 9 ms 10 ms 68.2.13.134
4 * 11 ms 9 ms 68.2.13.26
5 * 12 ms 11 ms 68.2.13.30
6 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms chnddsrj01-ae2.rd.ph.cox.net [68.2.14.9]
7 61 ms 25 ms 23 ms 68.1.0.232
8 22 ms 20 ms 21 ms dpr1-ge-2-0-0-298.losangelesequinix.savvis.net [
208.173.157.37]
9 24 ms 24 ms 23 ms dcr1-so-3-0-0.losangeles.savvis.net [204.70.194.1]
10 25 ms 23 ms 33 ms dcr2-so-2-0-0.SanFranciscosfo.savvis.net [204.70.192.90]

11 31 ms 31 ms 34 ms 206.24.211.18
12 33 ms 32 ms 31 ms border2.ge1-1-bbnet1.sfo002.pnap.net [63.251.63.17]
13 31 ms * 32 ms border2.ge1-1-bbnet1.sfo002.pnap.net [63.251.63.17]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * Unable to resolve target system name phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net.

The result of the same command with phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net was
worse.

So does anyone know how to solve this. I was hoping Apple would be more
responsive, considering their music store is unreachable, but they said it
was cox's fault. Cox was no help
either. I tried running the command from my own computer, and I had
the same unreachable results. My friend ended up doing this stuff at
her work computer, which has cox service as well, and she was able to reach
the sites. It's seems to be a dns thing, but I'm not much of a network
admin. Thanks for any suggestions ~ Chris



 --
I worry about viruses like I worry about terrorists