[WAN] Akamai content distribution

[tomcatuk.net]

Hi,

I'm having trouble with Akamai - for those that aren't familiar with Akamai here's a very brief summary - Akamai provide localised content distribution for major websites. MSN search are a good example - when you run a search through MSN, the Akamai system directs you to one of their servers that is geographically close to you. Try pinging search.msn.com and you'll more than likely be presented with a different IP address to the one I get (84.53.134.200) in much the same way that the google.com you get is dependant on your location. Hope that part makes sense. Go to Akamai.com if you want to read up on them - apparently they handle a huge percentage of all internet traffic.

For some reason we don't get served any content by the Akamai servers. I have tried using some different DNS servers so we get different Akamai machines when resolving search.msn.com but to no avail. No matter which of Akamai's servers we request data from, the result is the same. For MSN search we get the "This service is currently unavailable". If we try and view images hosted by them we get a "DNS Failure" from the web browser.

It occurred to me that our IP address might have been banned in some way, but if that was the case (as I understand it) we wouldn't be able to ping the IP address, but we can, and get great respoonse times.

Have spoken to Akamai and had them query the relevant IP addresses and they assure me that the servers at the IP addresses I gave them do belong to them, and are running correctly.

It's not a local network problem, our ISP seems to be the point at which the problem exists as I've spoken to their techies and they have the same issue - no search.msn.com for them either!

Stumped - any help appreciated!

Edited May 9, 2006 by Gouki

[tomcatuk.net]

Don't you just hate it when people don't post the solution? Got to the bottom of it today:

By default it seems Small Business Server 2003 had set the DNS server properties with forwarders to the DNS servers at our ISP. Removed them and bingo! all sites with content provided by Akamai display correctly & MSN Search is available again. Here's what it looks like WORKING:

The thing I don't get is why this problem only showed up 4 days ago out of the blue - possibly someone here logged onto the server and messed with the settings but I kind of doubt it. Windows Update perhaps? Or a change to Akamai's (quite frankly strange) method of dealing with DNS?

If anyone has any possible reasons why this might have happend I'd like to know