boeingair

That would be the problem--see some of the above posts.

flyinryan

Not being an IT person, I can't speak intelligently as to the cause(s) for this problem with united.com and Comcast. I can, however, state with great certainty that I can use EVERY OTHER website out there that I normally use, including this one, with the exact same Comcast ISP that I use for united.com, with none of the united.com headaches.
So, is the problem here really with Comcast? Or is it with .bomb?

boeingair

As hard as it is to believe, it really is with Comcast. This same thing happened with Cox when T-Mobile's USA's website was first launched.

In the posts above, an afflicted Comcast person confirms by using their Verizon cell phone tethered to their computer, and UA.com works fine.

flyinryan

Yes, I did read that - lacking a cellphone data connection, that's not gonna work for me.
I am flabbergasted. It's not that I don't take your word for it...I just need a better explanation than Comcast sometimes hates united.com but works fine with other websites.

flyinryan

Just got this from .bomb support:

Thank you for your email, Mr. flyinryan.
We have occasionally been experiencing technical errors with certain
Comcast servers recognizing united.com servers. Comcast should be aware
of this issue. Please contact your Internet Service Provider and verify
that they recognize our servers (united.com, ua2go.com, and itn.net).
Also, please try this alternate URL to access our website:
http://209.87.112.93.

This is really bizarre! Can someone fill me in on why my Comcast ISP will play with all the other kids on the WWW playground, but sometimes won't play with a kid like .bomb that is notorious for being a little screwy anyway?
Knowing what I know about united.com, I really suspect that the problem is in their protocol, not the Comcast side of things.
PS: it's also working for me as of now.

choster

Well, I'm on an AT&T T1 line at work and Comcast cable at home and have had "connection refused" messages on both since yesterday, so this particular issue may not be the cause of the current problems.

Can't log in or even search for flights. It stalls on reaching www.ua2go.com/ci/SabreBridge.jsp...? Hey, what's that contrAAption doing here in UALand?

HereAndThere

This is all nuts (and not warm ones either). I still can't get beyond UA's home page. Keep getting a message that browser can't connect to server at ua2go.com.
I have no problem connecting to any other Web site that I know of.
I will call Comcast later when I have time and see what they say, but if everything else is working how can it be a Comcast problem?

flyinryan

That's what I'm saying! Is there no tech guru out there who can explain this?

hockeyguy

I won't claim to be an expert on internet-wide systems, but there are two major services provided by any ISP that, if done incorrectly, can cause these kinds of problems. They are:

1) Routing -- sending each packet of data to the correct destination
2) Name lookup (DNS) -- turning hostnames into IP addresses

Both are fairly complicated in today's internet, and an incorrect configuration entry at any number of places on the internet can lead to the kind of strange, sporadic problems like the ones reported in this thread. Also, the information for each of these services is propagated throughout the internet, rather than being simply configured in a single place, which can make problems very difficult to troubleshoot, especially for an end user. Unfortunately, this also means that it can be difficult to determine who is the real source of the problem, and it may turn out that the problem does only affect access to one site or a small set of sites, rather than the whole internet.

In this case, I have no problem believing that it may be Comcast at fault. Comcast has a history of problems with DNS. Last year, their DNS servers failed every evening for a week or two, essentially cutting off access to the internet for all their users at least in the Denver area (although I though I read about other outages across the country at the same time). I also had trouble reaching a few other web sites at various times due to routing problems.

In short, if access works from one ISP but not another, there's a pretty decent chance that the ISP is at fault. In many cases, these problems are intermittent and disappear within a day or two once updated information is propagated throughout the internet, but if they last longer, it's probably worth a call to your ISP.

Incidentally, I have Comcast cable modem service here in the Devner area and I haven't had any (unusual ) problems using the united.com web site recently.

Kremmen

If it happens to be a DNS issue, one of the problems that I could see happening esp. with ual.bomb is that DNS entries tend to be cached by ISPs for long periods. Let's say your ISP's DNS server tries to look up ual.com and it fails because of some temporary error. It might be that the ISP caches the negative response for minutes/hours/days before it ever checks again. In one case when I was using Qwest, the primary Qwest DNS server wasn't able to correctly resolve a domain query until about a day after the secondary DNS server. (This is an advantage of setting up your own local DNS server at home. Then you can tell it which DNS servers to use in which order, instead of relying on your own ISP's possibly crappy choices.)

Kremmen

When I try to go to "My Itineraries" in Mozilla, ual.com does it's usual little bit of redirecting from one URL to another to waste time and bandwidth before going to the URL: "https://www.ua2go.com/ci/javascript:noLinks()", which says
Under IE, it works, so yet another screwup because their web people are too incompetent to program the site properly.

[Edit: If I go in via Mileage Summary/E-upgrades/Request Upgrade, then I can see my itineraries, just not the other way!]

HereAndThere

My Web access to United.bomb was restored by yesterday afternoon. It was working when I tried it then and it is still working this morning. I have no idea why it quit or why it started working again.

flyinryan

Thanks, hockeyguy and Kremmen for helping to clear this up.
Even if this isn't 100% a .bomb problem, it still sucks.

BillLumberg

How the hell do I get my DETAILED monthly mileage summary. I'm talking the breakdown of all miles accumulated through flights, credit cards, promotions, etc. I swear I've seen it once, but I can't for the life of me find it on the website.

Am I going crazy?

rar indeed

Mileage summary -> the "View" button on the bottom right corner.