DNS problems (in General)

This is the second time today that the ISP gandi.net is unreachable from just about every place I can check from.
This happens to be the ISP that runs the nameservers for both carnageblender.com and utahpython.org (the server that runs the themes and some static files).
Because of this, once the cache of the nameserver of your own ISP has expired, you will have a very hard time playing CB (or need to be skilled enough to work around it).

Jon, if you need secondary nameservers that are unrelated to gandi.org, I could provide you with one (or a few).

Whew I thought I was getting messed with.

I've been playing using the ip all morning, the problem is going to be
the root nameservers failing to update for a full 24 hours, better to get the existing nameservers back up and online.

If impatient, the following 2 lines, when added to /etc/hosts will fix it for you. I think Windows has a similar file, burried deep in C:\windows. Note: only use this temporary, as this won't track any future changes:

208.186.101.116 cb2.carnageblender.com carnageblender.com www.carnageblender.com
69.60.123.152 utahpython.org

It's surprising how few people stayed on CB while it was down, the number was down to around 10 I believe.

208.186.101.116

In case of another gandi.net failure, you can still use that to access the CB site to continue playing. You may want to bookmark that for a later date, as I did.

That's not enough in situations like this, as the theme server also depends on the same ISP for their DNS. Yes, you could access CB by IP, but each page took ages to load...

thankfully I think my theme is still being cached by my browser...I'd die without my modern mono...

\windows\system32\drivers\etc\lmhosts.sam

lmhosts.sam is for the local network (when it's not named .sam(ple)). The directory sounds like the right one, there should be a hosts file as well there.

A DDOS attack is what caused it.