URL that times out for some users and not others ...

[Ashley Aitken]

Howdy All,

I have set up a bulletin board using PHPBB2 for discussion amongst a  
relatively small group of users.  The bulletin board works fine,  
however, a few people are reporting that the URL to connect to the BB  
is timing out for them, whereas for myself (from a number of  
locations) and many others it is not timing out.

It doesn't seem to be a DNS issue since all the people can ping the  
site using the URL I give them, I think it might have something to do  
with the fact that the URL I have given these people is a MacOSX  
virtual domain on a machine with a number of other virtual domains  
(and, of course, the BB software).

The virtual domain (if that is the right term) maps to the phpBB2  
directory and loads the default file index.php for the bulletin  
board.  I have also set up the host within my domain on ZoneEdit to  
map to the required IP address (and again there are a number of host  
names in that domain that map to that machine).

Any idea why an URL (as described above) would give no response  
(timeout) for some users and yet work fine for others?

Any ideas on how I could track down the problem?  Would it most  
likely be the PHP software?  Would it be Apache on MacOSX Server  
10.4.8?  Or something else?

Could it be the performance cache?  Would it most likely be client or  
server-side?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Cheers,
Ashley.

PS Someone send me the output of a "telnet <url> 80" which connected  
and when they entered a "get ..." it just timed-out.

--
Ashley Aitken
Perth, Western Australia
mrhatken at mac dot com
Skype Name: MrHatken (GMT + 8 Hours!)