Ask HN: What's Up with Archive.today?

[nobody9999]

Archive.[today|is|ph|il|md|etc.] has been unresponsive for the last few days.

I've searched around a bit but haven't seen any reporting as to what's up with the site(s).

Does anyone have any information about this? Speculation? Wild rumors?

[nobody9999]

It appears that whatever issue was impacting Archive.today has been resolved (at least for me).

Thanks for the suggestions. It seems odd that I (presumably via GeoIP location) was continually resolving archive.today sites to non-functional IP addresses, especially since I live in a very densely populated region.

Then again, I'd expect that other than Bender[0] and myself, not very many folks run their own recursive resolvers.

Again, thanks for the suggestions. Although some wild speculation/rumors could have been fun ("archive.today admins abducted by aliens!" or "Malware plot by beer-making Belgian monks takes down parts of archive.today infrastructure." or "Zip bombs make archive.today unresponsive!", etc.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49042612

[gnabgib]

Looks fine (bonus, you have your own Archive page)

https://archive.is/93mjz

[nobody9999]

I'd add that every so often I get a "Welcome to nginx" page instead of just a time out.

[Qision]

I'm facing the same problem with my normal internet access but I just tried through Tor and it works fine. Hope this helps!

Edit: I just noticed that the Tor browser indicates a .onion version of the website is available and it works perfectly.

[Bender]

Who are you using for DNS? If Cloudflare there is a long running squabble between Archive's admins and CF as CF refuses to forward EDNS Client Subnet information and so they return bogus information to Cloudflares servers. Their admin has accounts here but they rarely interact and seem to keep creating new accounts.

It responds fine for me but I am using my own DNS server that talk directly to the root/tld servers.

Here are some other public DNS servers. [1] ...not my site

Alternatively use 107.189.8.227 in your hosts file for each of those names for now though it does change.

[1] - https://dnschecker.org/public-dns

[nobody9999]

>Who are you using for DNS? If Cloudflare there is a long running squabble between Archive's admins and CF as CF refuses to forward EDNS Client Subnet information and so they return bogus information to Cloudflares servers. Their admin has accounts here but they rarely interact and seem to keep creating new accounts.

DNS resolution is not the issue. Like you, I use my own recursive resolver and the various archive.[today|il|is|ph|etc] sites all resolve without issue, but weirdly MXToolbox[0] resolves those hosts to a different IP address.

I suppose my ISP could be intercepting my recursive queries, but that seems unlikely as I've never detected a dns proxy before.

I'll do some more investigating and, if it is my ISP, I've been looking for a reason to dump them anyway.

[0] https://mxtoolbox.com/DNSLookup.aspx

[Bender]

The IP will be different depending on where you are making the query from. Try adding that IP I listed to hosts and see if it starts working. It could be one or more of their nodes are down.

[cpach]

Works fine for me. (Sweden, tried on my smartphone using LTE connection.)

[al_borland]

I used .ph earlier today and it worked.