Unfortunately, there seem to be some problems with at least a number of NASA websites. Most importantly, the KSC media gallery is no longer accessible. I noticed that yesterday, when I tried to find a good picture to go with yesterday’s article. Unfortunately, the site seems to be defunct and the problem still persists.
Of course, I doubted a local problem first. However, other users (from all around the world) report similar problems. Also, being a network guy, I traced the NASA site both from Europe and the US and it didn’t work in either case. NASA currently has IP packages being bounced between two systems, until the packets expire. Looks like either a router has died or there is a configuration problem.
Unfortunately, the media gallery is not the only resource that is down. Essentially, a number of KSC sites are affected and so I guess there is a problem with the main public Firewall (or whatever…). The bad news is that this will limit my ability to post nice pictures along with the blog posts. Obviously, I hope the situation will be resolved soon. In the mean time, you know why there are so few pictures in the blog these days ;)
There is a problem with the KSC site routing table(s). I have repeatedly informed NASA, yet no action has been taken yet. Data is listed incorrectly for some IP addresses, so if you can’t get http://www.ksc.nasa.gov or http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov then try to access these pages using another Internet connection, e.g. a dial-up connection or a computer in a public library. The KSC site is working ok – the problem is its list of IP addresses to send the packets to when you attempt to download from the KSC site.
If you are affected, then tell NASA at http://www.nasa.gov/about/contact/ask_nasa_form.html
NASA have demonstrated a mixture of arrogance, incompetence and indifference in this matter. The problems with the KSC site remain and no action has been taken. Using a proxy server is no good, because the Kennedy Media Gallery uses silly javascript links and not proper hyperlinks, and the proxy server cannot download them. Two words sum up my experience of KSC: A Mess