neverwas coughed up some electrons that declared:

Can you ping 81.2.78.41?

no

If not, there's a routing problem between our two ISPs, or you got
unlucky and tried when my ADSL fell over.

If you can, must be a DNS problem - I'd like to look into that so any
feedback would be helpful.


Doesn't look like DNS: see tracert results below.

Tracing route to mothra.dionic.net [81.2.78.41]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.123.254
2 8 ms 7 ms 8 ms 10.181.40.1
3 7 ms 8 ms 7 ms osr01dals-v11.network.virginmedia.net

snip

14 11 ms 11 ms 13 ms careless.aaisp.net.uk [81.187.81.72]
My ISP

15 40 ms 40 ms 67 ms 81.2.78.28
My ADSL router

16 45 ms 41 ms 46 ms warpfield.dionic.net [81.2.78.46]
My firewall+internal router

How odd... The web server in question hasn't been down in the last few days
and you make it as far as my internal router (a Linksys, reloaded with my
own cut of OpenWRT).

The mystery deepens.

Thanks for the very detailed diagnostic - later, when I'm back home, I'll
have a look at my logs.

I need to rebuild my router and web server anyway, but even so, this should
not be happening...

Cheers

Tim