FM 96.9 goes off the air again (but comes back)

San Diego has a pirate radio station at 96.9. An article a friend wrote put me onto them. Some time ago, they got raided, their equipment was confiscated, and they got knocked off the air. Then they came back. Well, as of about 10:50 this morning, the signal blinked out again. It came back at 11:08, so I guess it must've been a technical problem. What's odd is their web page is also down (they know about it, but they weren't sure what the problem was.)

I noticed the problem around 10:30 when I couldn't get to their web page (normally www.pirate969.org, it's in Google's cache here ). "OK," thought I, "something's probably wrong with our DSL." I turned on the radio to double-check and picked up their signal just fine. Then I started troubleshooting the network. Then, at 10:51, the signal suddenly cut out. At that point, I figured another raid had confiscated their transmitter, but as I was writing this entry the signal came back. So I called the station (got the phone number off the Google cache of the web page -- for future reference, in case the cache evaporates, their phone is 619-501-9532 and e-mail is freeradiosandiego at gmail dot com). They know the web page is off the air but don't know why.

Further exploration showed that their web hosting service is no longer serving their domain name. The Internet, you see, runs on addresses, those 1.2.3.4 numbers you sometimes see. Humans don't remember those addresses very well. We much prefer names, like "www.pirate969.org". So there's a translation service, called the Domain Name Service, or DNS, that translates names to addresses. If there's no translation, then when you type in "www.pirate969.org", your web browser doesn't know what address to go to, so you can't connect.

Righto, so let's figure out what's up with the station's web page. We'll start with the ".org" part and ask the computers that handle ".org" where to find "pirate969.org". On linux systems, the "dig" command will do that:

$ dig @tld2.ultradns.net. pirate969.org. soa

; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> @tld2.ultradns.net. pirate969.org. soa
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 55133
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;pirate969.org.                 IN      SOA

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
pirate969.org.          86400   IN      NS      ns4.flawless-hosting.com.
pirate969.org.          86400   IN      NS      ns3.flawless-hosting.com.

;; Query time: 28 msec
;; SERVER: 204.74.113.1#53(204.74.113.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Aug 13 11:24:32 2006
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 87

Translation: "Yo, people who handle all the '.org' domain names, who's got 'pirate969.org'?" "Dude, ns4.flawless-hosting.com and ns3.flawless-hosting.com handle that."

$ dig @ns4.flawless-hosting.com. pirate969.org. soa

; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> @ns4.flawless-hosting.com. pirate969.org. soa
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 59423
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;pirate969.org.                 IN      SOA

;; Query time: 88 msec
;; SERVER: 66.45.232.84#53(66.45.232.84)
;; WHEN: Sun Aug 13 11:27:05 2006
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 31

Translation: "Yo, ns4.flawless-hosting.com, who handles pirate969.org?" "Beats me, man, no idea."

So it looks like someone's confused, but at least the station's still on the air. For now. I gave them a heads-up about the DNS problem so maybe the web page will be back too.