Fixing Akamai

At some point last night, a bunch of Akamai's servers went down. Akamai is a content provider for a huge number of website, which means that they serve images, stylesheets, and JavaScript for those websites so that the website owners don't have to buy a lot of servers to serve it themselves. These websites include facebook, newegg, ebay, imdb, and others. Sometime on the night of Sep 15, a number of Akamai servers went down; however, they did not update DNS records for the domains that pointed to these servers, which resulted in sites becoming either completely unusable or just looking like crap.

Currently, it looks like the affected IP addresses are 198.189.255.75-6 and 198.189.255.81-4. The simple solution to this problem at this point is to edit your hosts file and add a working IP address (such as 198.189.255.73 or 198.189.255.74) for the affected domains. To get the domain, simply load the offending page and wait for the status bar to say "connecting to *server name*" where it will stall there forever. Take note of the server name.

Then, as an administrator (or super-user on Unix-like OSes), open the hosts file and add this line to it:

198.189.255.73 *stalled server name*

Save the file and restart your browser. If that doesn't work, then reset your network connection by unplugging/plugging your ethernet cable or turning off/on your wireless connection.

Unfortunately, hosts files don't support wildcards, so you have to do this manually for each domain (of course, you can put in more than one domain at a time, but each needs its own entry).

Where is my hosts file?

• In Windows, probably C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\hosts. If not there, then whatever path is specified in the registry by \HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\DataBasePath
• On Unix-like machines, /etc/hosts

I can't save it!

You aren't running it as an admin (windows) or super (unix).

• Windows
  • Vista – right-click on a shortcut to Notepad, then select Run as -> Administrator. The open the hosts file from within Notepad.
  • Other versions: log in as an admin user
• Unix
  • Mac OS X – open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, then enter this command

sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts

enter your admin password, make the changes, and save the file

• • Others: sudo edit the file with your editor of choice.

I'm using Mac, what to do?

Follow the instructions for Unix.