For the past two days I have been in literal Vacuumland hell! This place is quite fun and habit-forming, but for some reason I have been unable to access the site at all since early Friday evening, nor the automaticwasher.org site, on any of my home computers.
I tried it on my desktop PC (Windows 2000 running Firefox, Netscape and Internet Explorer), My Mac (a klunker with OS9.2.2 running Netscape and Internet Explorer), and a PC Laptop (WinME w/ IExplorer)
No one seems to know the reason for this -- it's a real Catholic School mystery. But I sure have been going into withdrawal not being able to come here and get my Sweeper Fix! :(
When I came to church today (Sunday), I logged onto the site with my office computer here and was able to get in, so here I am. So it seems there is either something in my home network router that's getting in the way, or else the web host that holds the two sites has blocked my home computer I.P. numbers for some reason.
I will note that the ONLY sites I am unable to access at home are vacuumland, automaticwasher, and lunerpages.com (the home site for the company that hosts the two collector sites).
Does anyone know if anyone else has been having a similar problem?
I shut down my entire system -- all PCs, router and modem -- and restarted, still nothing. I called Earthlink's creepy Tech Support (now based in the Philippines) and they had no clue.
bla bla bla, I am sorry to run on about it but it really is frustrating not to be able to get in here!
Hope everyone is well and has a safe and happy Labor Day. I may or may not be back here again until Wednesday when I come back down to the church again, depending on what happens at home.
I am VERY happy to report that I can once again access vacuumland.org ---- spread the happy news far and wide!
The thing that fixed it was going into my TCP/IP (internet connection) settings and changing Earthlink's default DNS servers (207.69.188.185 and 207.69.188.186) to the ones given in the second paragraph below (excerpted from Lunar Pages' report to Fred Nelson -- Lunar Pages is the web hosting service where this web site "lives").
It was just that simple. Which, of course, is why no-one (especially the "over-analytical" folks at Earthlink) couldn't figure it out.
Now, I just hope this doesn't mean I can ONLY access vacuumland.org and not the REST of the Internet..........! (At this point, nothing would surprise me.)
Fred, thanks for your help with this very bizarre problem.
And if any of you hear of other people having this problem, please pass this information along.
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An Earthlink customer has reported that the Earthlink support team provided him with 2 nameservers, 202.27.184.3 and 202.27.184.5, that worked to connect to our network.
An additional customer reported that the above nameservers did not work and provided the following pair of DNS servers: 207.69.188.100 and 207.69.188.101, that allowed them to connect.
I had a problemtoo-I had to access Vacuumland thru a link from Applianceville-typed into the Yahoo homepage(was able to access before)but this time it showed Vacuumland doesn't exist!