The purpose of this blog is to keep the Apolyton Civilization Site community informed of what’s going on during (planned or unplanned) server downtime — which is hopefully rare but from time to time unavoidable. By maintaining this blog off-site we can keep the lines of communication open when everything else fails. It does not replace our Maintenance and Service Interruption Log but rather supplements it when the forums are unreachable.
Whenever the site is down we will let you know what’s happening here as soon as we find out ourselves (which will be in advance of the outage if it’s planned, as soon as possible afterwards if not) and keep you up-to-date as we work to bring the site back online.
If you cannot get to the site but see no update here, feel free post a comment to this entry to ask what’s going on. If it’s an issue on our end we will post a new blog entry to provide details and allow for further discussion as soon as possible, if not we will try to help you figure out the problem if we can.
You can subscribe to the RSS feeds at the bottom of the page to be automatically notified of updates to this blog through your news reader, or use it in combination with a service like RSS FWD to receive email notifications.
Apolyton Off-Site Service Log 
April 13, 2009 at 11:36 am |
Is apolyton.net still down? i Haven’t been able to connect to the site since it went down on 4/11/09.
April 13, 2009 at 12:29 pm |
The site was only down for a few hours, it has been back up for quite some time. Are you getting any kind of error message or is the page load just timing out?
April 13, 2009 at 10:33 pm |
Error, website cannot be displayed. Tried to connect on 2 different computers. Its not working for me.
April 13, 2009 at 10:50 pm |
Tried on a different browser. Getting a timeout error now.
April 21, 2009 at 5:49 pm |
Can anybody help me? I keep getting a timeout error when trying to connect to apolyton.net. Anyone know how to fix?
April 21, 2009 at 10:52 pm |
My apologies, Rugie, I got distracted by some issues on Apolyton and this ended up falling through the cracks. I assume you tried on different PCs in the same network? It would seem highly unlikely you’d have the same problems from different networks when the site is clearly up and running.
It’s probably a bad DNS issue — definitely something to do with your ISP, as you’re the only one we know of with these problems and you’ve had them for over a week (meaning it can’t be a normal network traffic issue, those don’t persist for so long). I would recommend that you configure your pc/network to use OpenDNS, see if that works: https://www.opendns.com/start/
If that doesn’t work, post a traceroute. In Windows XP or earlier, go to Start > Run and type: tracert apolyton.net > c:\trace.txt (in Vista type the same in the Start menu search bar). Note that this command may take some time to run. When it’s done, post the content of trace.txt here.
April 23, 2009 at 8:31 am |
The OpenDNS didn’t work. Tried the to do the trace route but it closes out after running for about 15 seconds. I don’t know what to do. I really wanna try out your civ games. When do the trace route the 4th line says request timed out.
April 25, 2009 at 7:42 am |
Hmmm, that’s weird. At 4 jumps your trace route is probably still within your ISP’s network, not anywhere close to Apolyton. I guess that they are either blocking OpenDNS, pings, or us for some reason. Can you post the actual traceroute? (I.e. the contents of the c:\trace.txt file, or whatever you called it.)
April 27, 2009 at 4:19 am |
Weird indeed.
Some further suggestions, going on the assumption that you are currently experiencing ongoing difficulties accessing Apolyton only based on your regular browsing experiences:
1. Are you able to access any other Apolyton domains, Rugie? Say, civilization4.net or calltopower.net for example? Either way, traceroute result?
2. Are you able to access the website of Apolyton’s hosting provider, ThePlanet? (theplanet.com) Either way, traceroute result?
3. You mentioned trying to connect from 2 different computers. Were these computers at different locations, or (at least) accessing the Internet through different Internet Service Providers (ISPs)?
4. Are you running any firewalls, software (e.g. Windows Firewall) or hardware (e.g. within your router, if you use one to connect to the Internet)? If so, perhaps there is something within its settings that is preventing you from accessing Apolyton for some reason.
If nothing else, hopefully the above helps continue the process of elimination…
April 27, 2009 at 7:59 am |
Tracing route to c:\trace.txt [208.69.36.132]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 15 ms 14 ms 11 ms ge-1-1-ur01.greenwood.in.indiana.comcast.net [68
.85.178.153]
4 9 ms 12 ms 9 ms 68.85.176.218
5 13 ms 12 ms 12 ms 68.85.177.26
6 20 ms 19 ms 18 ms pos-0-15-0-0-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [
68.87.230.9]
7 30 ms 19 ms 18 ms pos-0-10-0-0-cr01.chicago.il.ibone.comcast.net [
68.86.90.45]
8 20 ms 28 ms 19 ms po-0-1-0-0-pe01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net
[68.86.86.38]
9 19 ms 19 ms 21 ms te4-3.ccr02.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.11.
253]
10 20 ms 18 ms 23 ms vl3803.na31.b002281-5.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [
38.20.40.174]
11 22 ms 21 ms 18 ms 38.104.102.62
then is closes out
April 30, 2009 at 6:27 pm |
Sorry, lots of stuff going on on Apolyton right now, been very busy this week. Dan posted just above you but the comment wasn’t approved until just now. Can you answer his queries?
May 2, 2009 at 5:17 am |
I can connect to theplanet.com but none of the apolyton sites work. I’m going to try looking further into my isp. I think that might be the problem.
Below are my trace routes.
civiliaztion4.net…
Tracing route to c:\trace.txt [208.69.36.132]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 15 ms 10 ms 14 ms ge-1-1-ur01.greenwood.in.indiana.comcast.net [68
.85.178.153]
4 23 ms 15 ms 12 ms 68.85.176.218
5 38 ms 28 ms 24 ms 68.85.177.26
6 21 ms 24 ms 20 ms pos-0-15-0-0-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [
68.87.230.9]
7 20 ms 20 ms 28 ms pos-0-10-0-0-cr01.chicago.il.ibone.comcast.net [
68.86.90.45]
8 24 ms 30 ms 19 ms po-0-1-0-0-pe01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net
[68.86.86.38]
9 21 ms 20 ms 23 ms te4-3.ccr02.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.11.
253]
10 24 ms 21 ms 21 ms vl3803.na31.b002281-5.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [
38.20.40.174]
11 22 ms 29 ms 29 ms 38.104.102.62
12
theplanet.com
Tracing route to c:\trace.txt [208.69.36.132]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 2 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 13 ms 11 ms 11 ms ge-1-1-ur01.greenwood.in.indiana.comcast.net [68
.85.178.153]
4 11 ms 12 ms 22 ms 68.85.176.218
5 24 ms 15 ms 21 ms 68.85.177.26
6 20 ms 18 ms 18 ms pos-0-15-0-0-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [
68.87.230.9]
7 29 ms 19 ms 21 ms pos-0-10-0-0-cr01.chicago.il.ibone.comcast.net [
68.86.90.45]
8 32 ms 21 ms 22 ms po-0-1-0-0-pe01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net
[68.86.86.38]
9 22 ms 18 ms 24 ms te4-3.ccr02.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.11.
253]
10 23 ms 21 ms 18 ms vl3803.na31.b002281-5.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [
38.20.40.174]
11 25 ms 19 ms 24 ms 38.104.102.62
12
May 9, 2009 at 4:38 pm |
So you’re very specifically having a problem with Apolyton, while even sites in the same physical building are just fine. Do you have any problems reaching other gaming sites, like Gamespot, IGN, 1Up, CivFanatics.com, WePlayCiv.com, GamersWithJobs.com, NeoGAF.com, QuarterToThree.com? If so, it may well be that you have some kind of parental controls type block that prevent you from accessing gaming sites. This block could be on your local machine, local network or on ISP level.
Can you get through to Apolyton when using some kind of proxy service? E.g. http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://apolyton.net — mind you, the site is actually down at the time of writing and has had a lot of difficulties in the last week or so, so if it doesn’t work the first time try a few times later (there’s a thread about the site being down here: http://www.weplayciv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=396 — hopefully someone will post there when the site is back up again; if I remember I will post it here as well but I no longer work for Apolyton, I don’t have any inside knowledge and don’t visit regularly anymore).
May 12, 2009 at 4:14 pm |
I can get on thru the link but it wont let me download without becoming a member. Wish you guys had mirrors to dl from.