Right now (9:00 AM in Washington DC), I can't access www.google.com. 
I'm also having trouble with a few other sites, but most sites are OK
(including, obviously, answers.google.com).

I can successfully ping www.google.com, but I can't complete a
tracetroute -- I've included the ping and traceroute reports below. 
My questions are:

1.  What conditions would lead to a successful ping, but an
unsuccessful traceroute?

2.  Is www.google.com down for other folks right now, or is it just me
(in other words, is the problem in their system, or my system)?

3.  In general, is there a way to get a real time status report about
a site as to whether it's operating normally or not?  Is there an
internet equivalent of the morning news traffic report that tells you
where there are problem spots on major sites?

Any insight on these questions would be much appreciated.

Dave

Ping www.google.com (216.239.51.101) 
 
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss 
Host reachable, average round-trip time: 0.238 ms 
  
Traceroute www.google.com (216.239.51.101) 
Hop IP Address Hostname Average RTT1 
1 192.168.1.8 baal.pair.net 0.33 ms 
2 192.168.1.8 baal.pair.net 0.28 ms 
3 208.30.208.41   5.83 ms 
4 144.232.14.85 sl-bb22-rly-3-0.sprintlink.net 6.01 ms 
5 144.232.20.46 sl-st21-ash-14-0.sprintlink.net 10.82 ms 
6 144.232.19.18   7.53 ms 
7 205.171.209.49 dca-core-03.inet.qwest.net 9.41 ms 
8 205.171.9.162 dcx-edge-01.inet.qwest.net 10.15 ms 
9 65.118.39.170   16.49 ms 
10 216.239.47.126 abni1-1-1.net.google.com 16.71 ms 
11 216.239.47.102 abbi1-1-1.net.google.com 17.13 ms 
12 Time-out 
13 Time-out 
14 Time-out 
15 Destination host unreachable

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Clarification of Question by davidsar-ga on 02 Sep 2002 06:28 PDT

It's worth noting that I was running some system maintenance tools
earlier.  Is it possible that a lost/corrupted cookie (or other file)
could interfere with access to certain sites, but not others?

Hi, 

Try going to http://216.239.51.101 with your browser and see if that
comes up. I would venture that the reason the traceroute dies there is
you hit the firewall or the load balancing.

If you can get to http://216.239.51.101 but not ://www.google.com
then you are looking at a DNS problem. I ran into the same thing with
COX the other day and instead of waiting for them to get it fixed
(down for over 12 hours) I set up my own DNS and its been working fine
since then.

Google is up and running here, west coast san diego, but you are going
to a server.. the ping IP address I get here is 216.239.51.100 . They
have several servers all over the world.

I would suggest that this is temporary, or you may have upset a DNS
record if you host your own on your system.

webadept-ga

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Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 02 Sep 2002 11:49 PDT

Never mind on the firewall thing.. just ran a trace route to the
216.239.51.100  and it resolved just fine. So there maybe a problem
with the server at 216.239.51.101, pings are rather non intrusive and
light, so you may get a ping and not a traceroute. Try
http://216.239.51.100 .. the google server the west coast is getting
and try a trace route to there as well. If its a Google problem, then
it will be up soon. They are pretty fast with these kinds of things.

---

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 02 Sep 2002 11:53 PDT

By the way  the difference between ping and traceroute is that ping
starts off by attempting to "get there", whereas traceroute starts off
by assuming it can't. With this, traceroute will die much sooner than
a ping will.

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Request for Answer Clarification by davidsar-ga on 02 Sep 2002 13:27 PDT

Thanks, webadept.  The situation has resolved itself on my end, but it
wasn't just google that was a problem, several sites that I routinely
visit were inaccessible for a few hours, suggesting some sort of
system problem.  But whether it was my system, a server, multiple
sites with problems, or something else entirely, is still a mystery.

Before I offer my rating of many stars, please let me know if you know
anything about item #3 in my question -- is there any sort of real
time traffic report about troublespots on the internet.  Don't sweat a
lot of new research (it's only a five buck question, after all), but I
just want to know what others might know about this.

---

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 02 Sep 2002 15:15 PDT

These two sites may be of interest to you in this area

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

http://www.mids.org/weather/

Thanks, and I'm glad you are back on the web and surfing. 

webadept-ga