Solving Problems Accessing Distant Web Sites

If you are unable to access a distant web site, and if you believe the web site is functioning normally, please try the following hints.

Include any dropped trailing slash. Many web site owners advertise their web site with a URL of this form:

   http://www.example.com

This is technically questionable, because the domain name should be always followed by a slash. Most web servers will interpret it correctly, but take no chances. Try this form instead:

   http://www.example.com/

(If the URL already contains at least three slashes as above, there is no need to add any more. Thus a URL of the form `http://www.example.com/somefile.html' is already correct.)

Use a proxy server as described on our servers page. This will not only greatly speed up access to most web sites, but will also allow you access webs site that make themselves inaccessible by filtering out ICMP packets and thus breaking the TCP/IP protocol.

If you are interested in knowing how and why some web sites make themselves inaccessible, please see the technical discussion at this URL: http://www.rahul.net/dhesi/webmtu/

Try Lynx. Web sites that do many fancy things might sometimes be overloaded and respond slowly or not at all. The Lynx browser, available from the UNIX shell, ignores all graphics and shows you only the text. It will sometimes let you access an overloaded web site when most graphical browsers will yield errors. From the UNIX shell just type:

     lynx http://www.example.com/

(specify the URL that you actually need.)

$Id: webaccess.html,v 1.3 1998/02/03 03:32:03 rdroot Exp $
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