I usually restart my router to be on the safe side but that’s it. Sometimes you can make a connection to the Internet but that connection feels slow, you get disconnections and websites that are not loading properly.

One way to find out if the problem is located on your side is to perform a tracert command to the target server. If that tracert times out you pretty much know the IP address of the server responsible for that along with information about the country the server is in.

This is also the basic approach of Hubble, a service that monitors Internet reachability in real-time. Instead of using one tracert at a time they send out more than 100k every 15 minutes to monitor reachability problems throughout the world using a Google Maps mashup to provide a map of so called black holes, meaning servers that are unresponsive or have a reduced reachability.

The interesting information for the users are the IP addresses or ranges of those servers and the country column of the table. Sorting the column by country reveals problematic server at a glance which can help determining if the problem is located at your end.

Related posts

• Remote Server Monitoring Software DreamSys Server Monitor (4)
• Play your MP3 collection remotely (0)
• eToolz Network Toolset (1)
• YubNub a social internet command line (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)

These rumors are most likely false. You can still reach Rapidshare.com if you use a Rapidshare IP like 80.239.151.250 instead. The connection is rather slow at the moment and a Rapidshare technican (unconfirmed though) posted a message saying that servers would be back online around midnight GMT.

We will see if the outage is really hardware related or does have other reasons. It is in my opinion unlikely that the police will raid servers on a Saturday instead of a weekday. Still it could be possible. Here is the message posted at the Round Views website.

As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare’s servers appear to be offline. There are rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by the authorities after a court order, however, court records do not reveal any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet. Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has commented on this issue – “There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)”

My personal opinion is that I would not worry to much and wait to see if the problems are fixed at midnight or in the following hours.

Update: Rapidshare up again !

Related posts

• Upload Files to Multiple File-Hosting Sites at One Time (21)
• Search Rapidshare with Rapidlibrary (21)
• Rapidshare Reduces Premium User Download Limit (26)
• Free File Hosting Downloader (6)
• DropBox Is Available For Everyone (4)