* Use Firefox or Google Chrome to see if it's the browser or the
computer.
* Use NSlookup from a command prompt to see what IP is being
returned and check it against the wikispaces IP.
* Run tracert from a command prompt on the students' laptops. Either
it will attempt to trace because it gets an IP from the DNS
server, or it will not get an IP. If it attempts to trace, you can
see where the routing stops.
* Check their file in windows/system32/drivers/etc to see if it has
a problem.
* Add wikispaces to their hosts file to see if it fixes the problem.
(This is a temporary work-around).
* Can they access it using an anonymizer, such as
http://stupidcensorship.com?
* If you think it's a DNS problem, try installing Dig
(http://members.shaw.ca/nicholas.fong/dig/ has instructions and a
link) so that you can use various servers. The resolv.conf file
goes in windows/system32/drivers/etc
While our school DNS servers are quite robust (we use DynDNS.com as our
recursive DNS provider), it's not unusual for the ISPs in the city to
either have faulty DNS servers or have a router that has a faulty path.
I ended up using DynDNS at home since the DNS server at my ISP was
failing some lookups. We also had a problem where several households
were unable to access our school server, referred to as the "zone of
darkness" while we were trying to figure it out. They were all in a
certain neighborhood north of the school and all had the same ISP. Turns
out the ISP had a misconfigured router.
Derrel
>> Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:25:07 -0400
>> From: callajud@hotmail.com
>> Subject: Re: Good K-8 websites for kids
>> To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
>>
>> I'm having a strange problem with Wikispaces. Out of all my teachers and students who are using it, I have 2 students who are unable to get to any site with wikispaces.com in the url, whether it's a wikispace page or a teacher page.
>>
>>
>>
>> Has anyone encountered this problem? Obviously I've check all settings, changed back to default etc. and check for parental control on the student's laptops. We're using IE8 for the most part.
>>
>>
>>
>> If anyone has any suggestion, thanks,
>>
>> Judy Callahan
>>
>> Berkeley Prep
>>
>> Tampa, FL
>>
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