Interactive Investor Research

MallyGirl

I don't get the error - Windows 10 and Chrome.

Sue_S

I've just checked, I've got a trading account and have accessed the "research" option from within that as you requested. All is OK. I'm using a PC, Microsoft Edge.

masonic

ivormonee wrote: »

If of any interest, this is what I've tried so far: two different computers, three different browsers on both, Windows and Linux operating systems, cleared cache and cookies on both computers for all browsers, performed flush DNS, checked DNS hosts file on Windows, temporarily disabled AV and firewall, pinged URLs.


The reason for the DNS related actions was because the screenshot shows that the URL being looked for is www3.iii.co.uk whereas the URL in the address bar is https://secure.ii.co.uk/webbroker2/select-list/etfs.sp. In other words I'm on the webpage https://secure.ii.co.uk/webbroker2/select-list/etfs.sp which shows the screenshot in my previous message.

Sounds like DNS may be the culprit. If you run the following command, what do you get?

nslookup www3.iii.co.uk

You should be seeing it resolve to an iicorp.uk domain and IP address, for example:

www3.iii.co.uk canonical name = tdor-www-tddirectinvesting-co-uk.resolv.iicorp.uk.
Name: tdor-www-tddirectinvesting-co-uk.resolv.iicorp.uk
Address: 185.194.40.22

My guess is that your DNS servers are not resolving that www3 domain name. If not, try repeating the command, specifying Google public DNS:

nslookup www3.iii.co.uk 8.8.8.8

If this solves the problem, you could specify alternative DNS servers on your router or OS network configuration that are being better maintained (Google's secondary DNS IP is 8.8.4.4).

ivormonee

Thanks MallyGirl and Sue S - that helped to identify the problem as "me only". Special thanks to masonic for the extra troubleshooting steps.


I tried nslookup and, as per your expectation, got the message: *** dsldevice.lan can't find www3.iii.co.uk: Server failed. I then tried nslookup with google's DNS and got:



nslookup www3.iii.co.uk 8.8.8.8
Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com
Address: 8.8.8.8

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: tdor-www-tddirectinvesting-co-uk.resolv.iicorp.uk
Address: 185.194.40.22
Aliases: www3.iii.co.uk


That indicated to me that the google nameserver should work. So I went into my TCP/ IPv4 settings and changed the DNS server addresses to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. For good measure I closed the browser, did an ipconfig /flushdns, reopened the browser and ... the problem was still there!



Unbelievable!



The mystery continues ...

Heedtheadvice

I guess my (previous) last post is irrelevant as I was not logged in to a trading account. It was maybe z temp problem.


Ivor yiu ask about technical support and masonic is giving you xome good support. I woukd agree from what you both write it would seem a DNS problem but you seem to have done all that I in my dotage could have advised except for posting your problem description in the techie board https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=29
to get more expert advice or even raising it on your ISP's community forum. I have noted similar queries regarding www3.ii.....on the Plusnet forum (not since the new web was published but certainly fairly recently.
Best wishes.

ivormonee

Thanks very much Heedtheadvice. What you posted was really useful. It confirms that there is a DNS issue of some sort and that nobody really understands exactly what it is or how it can be fixed. I can breathe a sigh of relief that my computer is not at fault, although I still can't access the website pages I need to within ii and may not be able to until either ii or the ISP is able to determine and fix the problem(s) with their DNS/ nameservers.

masonic

These problems have a way of resolving themselves eventually. DNS propagation tends to be a little unreliable and for some reason CNAME records tend to be more troublesome than most.

Ultimately, if you use Chrome, in a few versions time it will be carrying out DNS queries over HTTPS to it's own nameservers, which will cut your ISP out of the loop.

LHW99

Just tried logging in to II and can't - just get an error message.
Friday evening and everyone's gone home early I suppose.

ivormonee

Thanks again, Masonic. That's very useful to know. I might keep trying Chrome once in a while to see if that works at some point in the future. The whole affair though is poor as someone, somewhere - with the responsibility to make these things work - has failed with, probably, no consequence (for them).


LHW99 - your issue seems unconnected. The issue of this thread is the inaccessibility of some of the webpages within "Research" from the actual trading account once already logged in. If you can't even log in, then that's another issue.

purple_rose

Yes getting the same error all day