[SWLUG] How do I find the reason for a website refusing to connect

[Gareth Bowker]

On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 09:49, Neil Jones wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> A website belonging to an American charity is not working. I am getting
> a "connection was refused when attemting to contact ...."
> message from Epiphany and Konqueror says Could not connect to host.
> I can ping the address quite sucessfully.
> 
> Since I am invoved with a UK equivalent of the American Charity I would like 
> to offer them some diagnostic advice. 
> 
> Any ideas what could be causing this and what if any diagnostic tools I could 
> simply use from this end to find out what is the matter.

Given the message it sounds simply as if their web server is down (the
actual daemon rather than the machine, as you say you can ping it). To
double-check, try telnetting to the machine on port 80 e.g.

telnet www.randomwebsite.com 80

If that's coming back as connection refused there's not a huge amount
more you can do. If it comes back with something, try typing:

GET / HTTP/1.0

then hit return twice. If you get some html back then you at least know
that the server is working (although the html may not be what you're
expecting, if the site's hosted on a server with several websites).

>From what you've said though, it just sounds like the web server process
has died.

Gareth