Troubleshooting
This group of tools will let you check and troubleshoot if necessarry certain DNS and networking issues. It will also allow you to gather information about the installed software on the server that may prove useful if you're having trouble installing a third-party application you downloaded from the Net.
Your Domain's DNS Info
It is possible that you already had a domain name before you signed up with us or the domain name registration was part of the hosting package you purchased from us. In both cases it is highly recommended that you use our DNS servers to handle your domain name. If you purchased the name thru us this is already done and you shouldn't have to worry about that.
If you already had a domain name you can delegate the domain to our DNS servers and we will point the name to our mail and web servers. You can do this by contacting your registrar and asking them to set the authoritative name servers for your domain to ns1.ourserver.com and ns2.ourserver.com (you should have the correct DNS server names in the welcome email you received when you signed up with us). In most cases you should be able to set the name servers for your domain yourself using a web-based interface provided by your registrar.
You can find out if the name servers for your domain are set correctly by clicking the "DNS Info" link in the "Troubleshooting" group in Control Panel's main screen.
This will display the authoritative nameservers for your domain. If those are set correctly a message will be displayed confirming that everything is OK.
 | Please remember that changes to the global DNS databases take about 48 hours to take effect. This is sometimes referred to as "global DNS propagation". Therefore if your domain has been registered a short while ago our tool may not be able to list its nameservers because the DNS propagation has not completed yet. Also you may have changed the nameservers for your domain thru your registrar but our tool may still report the old values. This is normal. But if the problem persists two days after the nameserver change please contact our support service. |
Installed Software on the Server
The easiest way to find out if our server meets the requirements of an application you want to install is to click the "Installed Modules" link in the "Troubleshooting" group of the Control Panel's main screen.
You should see a list of installed system applications and their versions. If you're interested in a program that is not listed here please contact our support service and let them know.
If you're interested in details about an installed application click the respective link in the "Details" column of the table. You can get a list of installed Apache modules, detailed information about our PHP configuration provided by PHP's phpinfo() function, and various information about our Perl installation provided by the PerlDigger script (including a list of all installed Perl modules)
Network Troubleshooting Tools
This will allow you to run the popular ping and traceroute utilities from the server to any host you like. Your own IP address (and hostname) are shown at the top of the screen.
Click the "Network" link in the "Troubleshooting" group of the Control Panel's main screen.
Ping
Ping is an utility that shows how much time it takes for a small piece of data to be sent from the server to another host on the Internet and a response to that piece of data to return to the server.
To ping a host from the server enter the hostname in the "Host Name:" box of the "Ping" form. You should also enter how many packets to send to the host (use the "Packet Count" radio buttons) and how many seconds to wait between sending each packet ("Time between packets" radio buttons)
Once you click the "Ping" button you should get a results report containing statistics about each packet and a summary for all packets. The most important value to look at is the "Delay" for each packet, as well as the "average" "Delay" in the "Ping Results Summary" table.
Traceroute
The traceroute utility can show you the route that packets take from our server to another host connected to the Internet. There are two options that you can set in addition to the target host name: "Traces Count" and "Resolve Host Names". The first option will let you specify the number of queries that will be sent to each gateway on the route. If you disable the resolve option you will only see the IP addresses of the gateways and not their hostnames but your trace will take less time to execute.
The results of the trace will be formatted in table with seven columns.
The "Host" column will display the hostname or IP address of each gateway between our server and the target host.
The "Loss" column shows the packet loss in % for each gateway
The "Received" column shows the number of responses received from the respective gateway.
The "Sent" column shows the number of queries sent to the gateway. You can control this number via the "Tracec Count" option in the "Traceroute" form on the "Network Diagnostics" screen.
The last three columns will display information similar to the ping utility for each gateway. They show the minimum, average and maximum times that it takes for a packet to arrive to the respective gateway and a response to be returned to our server.
| A trace can take a while to complete (especially if you've enabled the "Resolve Host Names" option so please be patient and wait for the "Trace complete." message to appear. |