Can't Connect to Some NPS Websites? Don't Take it Out on Your Computer

Published Date

October 24, 2009

Photo by Bahamut0013 via Creative Commons.

Having problems connecting to some pages on NPS websites? Don't blame your computer or your service provider. There's an outage affecting some NPS sites on the Internet.

Here at the Traveler, we try to include helpful links to various websites in many of our articles. The goal is to make it easy for you to find more information on the parks and subjects covered in the story.

Since that's the case, we wanted to alert you to problems that began surfacing on some NPS websites on Friday, October 23—and they seem to be continuing into the weekend. A call to the NPS Public Affairs office yesterday afternoon confirmed they were aware of the difficulty with their own site, and folks were working on the issue.

Now that the weekend is underway, it's unknown what progress will be made before the start of the new workweek on Monday. The Traveler is run by a small team of volunteers, and we don't have any official connection to the NPS, so I'm afraid we don't have any insider information on the problem.

Back in the early days of television, it wasn't unusual to lose either picture or sound (or both), but if one or the other was still working, viewers became accustomed to the announcement: "Please do not adjust your set; the problem is with the station."

Taking a page from the past, we just wanted to suggest you not take out your frustrations on your computer. The problem is with the "station," not with your "set,"—or the links in the stories on this site.

Anybody got the phone number of that guy who claimed he invented the Internet?

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Submitted by admin on October 24, 2009 - 11:29am.

We were planning a visit to Lake Quinault Lodge over by the Hoh Rain Forest this morning and clicking on the main Olympic National Park link was dead, however clicking on other links within the website worked and, once inside, the main link then worked. It seems that workarounds work.

Submitted by tomp on October 26, 2009 - 1:59pm.

What you need is the phone number of the guy who invented internet firewalls, or of the network technicians working for the outside contractor who still don't have our firewalls & dmz configured correctly.

Or, in this particular case, either the person who wrote Windows Server, or the person who designed a system that requires rebooting rather than service stop / service restart. My guess is that you hit the patching and rebooting of all the servers running MS windows server as the os. A record stack of patches was released 2 weeks ago. The Denver & Fort Collins servers (including nature.nps.gov & science.nature.nps.gov) all patched & rebooted Wednesday evening. I believe the DC servers cycled Friday after COB their time, and between getting the servers rebooted in the correct order and testing, it would have taken several hours and possibly into Saturday. If any addresses changed, it could have taken an additional 24 hours for local router tables to flush the old addresses in their cache.

nps.gov/olym works Monday morning, although it is pathetically slow from here.

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