Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Provider blocking smdb...wtf

User - 4-12-2009 at 18:18

Hi,

Last week i noticed something very strange.
I did my daily forum round and realized i could not connect to SMDB.

Lots of factors here one could say, well i tested a couple of those.
Cleaning cache (cookies etc)
Dumping IP adress.
Resetting the stuff.
Trying other PC.

Nothing...


So I figured smdb is offline..Again.
Waited a freaking week...


And then something magical happend.
I logged on to my neighbours network.
(I am posting right now..)

So could it really be that it is blocked in any way?
Also could there be reason to?

I could still try connecting thru a proxy to check if this confirms any.



I wont reveal my provider but if it will be of importance ill do so.
Btw, I'm from holland ;)

Can anyone share some thoughts.

psychokinetic - 4-12-2009 at 19:04

Have you tried coming back from your network again? The entire site was up shit creek with a paddle left in the shed for a while while the head cheeses moved everything to a new server.

Here's hoping I'm right and there's no blocking going on.

Polverone - 4-12-2009 at 22:39

Yesterday the site became very slow because a few IP addresses had hundreds of connections open for file downloads from the site. It looked like they were spider programs. I don't mind spidering and archiving of the site but it was making the forum unusable. So I wrote a script that would check for IP addresses with more than 20 connections open to the site, and block them for up to 24 hours by adding a deny rule to the web server configuration.

It appears that a few users have been caught by this rule, though I'm not sure why yet. Before I added the 20 connection limit, I tested with Firefox and my own home DSL IP address, opening many threads as quickly as I could in different tabs. I couldn't get the number of open connections from my browser to go above 10. I thought 20 was plenty of head room for ordinary browsing.

But at least the following forum members have been caught by this rule today:
User
franklyn
carbonfeind
hua xue DIY
white rabbit

I was able to determine that by checking the blocked IP addresses against posting IP addresses. I am going to try to determine why those users had problems, and for now I am raising the open connection limit to 40 and clearing out the currently blocked addresses.

Edit: of the above, only hua xue DIY looked to actually be downloading more than ordinary. The other blocked users were a mixture of IE and Firefox users, so I can't easily blame a browser.

[Edited on 12-5-2009 by Polverone]

User - 5-12-2009 at 05:58

Right now iam connected through a free proxy server it really is the only way to even get to the website.
Anyway thanks for handling this issue.
*edit*
This is what i get if iam connecting the normal way:

404 Not Found
The resource requested could not be found on this server! Powered By LiteSpeed Web Server
LiteSpeed Technologies is not responsible for administration and contents of this web site!

[Edited on 5-12-2009 by User]

Polverone - 5-12-2009 at 09:45

Quote: Originally posted by User  
Right now iam connected through a free proxy server it really is the only way to even get to the website.
Anyway thanks for handling this issue.
*edit*
This is what i get if iam connecting the normal way:

404 Not Found
The resource requested could not be found on this server! Powered By LiteSpeed Web Server
LiteSpeed Technologies is not responsible for administration and contents of this web site!


You have DNS problems if that is the message you get. You would get a 403 forbidden error if the problem were the blocking script. Sciencemadness.org should resolve to 74.207.252.200. You could manually add hosts entries for sciencemadness.org and www.sciencemadness.org that resolve to those addresses. Another possibility is to set your primary DNS server to 4.4.2.2 rather than the one you're currently using (probably controlled by your ISP).

[Edited on 12-5-2009 by Polverone]