Donald Lancaster wrote in news:OW0Kg.12228$r61.7769
@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk:

There's plenty going on now, 11 vessels, so I imagine the site was down.


Or your path to the site might have been interrupted. Boot the "command
prompt" (dare we say DOS 5.2?) and enter:

ping aisliverpool.org.uk

and see if you can ping the server. If it never makes it there, that's why
you don't have data. Mine looks like:

C:\ping aisliverpool.org.uk

Pinging aisliverpool.org.uk [194.154.164.82] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 194.154.164.82: bytes=32 time=159ms TTL=48
Reply from 194.154.164.82: bytes=32 time=141ms TTL=48
Reply from 194.154.164.82: bytes=32 time=147ms TTL=48
Reply from 194.154.164.82: bytes=32 time=171ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 194.154.164.82:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 141ms, Maximum = 171ms, Average = 154ms

(I would have suggested tracert, the traceroute command, but many ISPs,
including mine, no longer allow traceroutes from their users because of
abuses we just can't seem to keep from doing.)

If, when the site is unreachable...and you don't get the IP above...it
means your ISP's DNS lookup server isn't taking the domain name and
resolving it to an IP. The internet has no idea where aisliverpool.org.uk
is located. You can also use http://194.154.164.82/ and try it directly,
but the other pages you want to go to all require DNS resolving to IP to
find so that won't help much. DNS failures are awful on some ISP systems.

You can put in your own DNS to your networking setup in Windoze, if you
like. The bigshot server is 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 for the whole internet.
It's open and anyone can use it to resolve addresses, bypassing the hosed
DNS at your cheapskate ISP...(c;

From my ping, I'd say it's about 150ms from Charleston, SC, to Atlanta, GA
to England and on to Liverpool......and back. Not bad at the speed of
light!

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

On Fri, 01 Sep 2006 18:07:09 -0400, Larry wrote:

Donald Lancaster wrote in news:OW0Kg.12228$r61.7769
:

There's plenty going on now, 11 vessels, so I imagine the site was down.


Or your path to the site might have been interrupted.

[snip interesting DNS story]

It is showing some ships, now, thanks. I did get the map outline,
just no ships. Presumably the map outline and the ship display are on
the same server?

I RTFM, after posting, of course :-) and the site designer explains
that he receives signals up to, say, 35 miles away. In fact the North
Channel is probably further than 35 miles from Liverpool, so some AIS
signals are reaching his system from longer away than his FAQ
suggests. But the site shows nothing on the 'atlantic gateway' along
the top of the Irish coast, or up towards the Minch. Presumably,
those areas are well beyond his system's capability.

I wonder if there is any way for the site to develop to display all
the traffic in the map areas that the site already contains? I'm
interested because we live on the coast, and notice that many of the
ships passing are bound for the North Channel, on their way to
wherever they are going.

And I've taken note of that DNS suggestion, thanks for that.


______________
best wishes,
Ron

(Ronnie) wrote in :

It is showing some ships, now, thanks. I did get the map outline,
just no ships. Presumably the map outline and the ship display are on
the same server?



Not necessarily. He could be storing the static parts of the webpage on a
remote server run by a whole different company, which is cheaper, then the
realtime data even on a small server onsite or in someone's home. It would
make sense.

There's no limit where he could store static parts of the webpages. They
come up here much faster than the actual data does, which supports this
hypothesis.

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.