domain http://aegidian.org/ not reachable from France?

[popsch]

Hi,

I'm currently traveling in France and have this weird problem: The oolite website is working, but the bulletin boards are not working (ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT). I'm now posting this through a SOCKS proxy in the US and the website is working normally. Since I only use hotel wifis, maybe they are blocking it, however, why should they?

Can anyone from France confirm this? (LOL, if I am right, they cannot even see this)

It seems that some firewall is dropping the IP traffic, because I need to wait my 5min for the timeout.

[Cody]

The forum was down a few days ago (see here) - that may be connected to your problem.

[popsch]

It's still not working right now. The DNS resolution is working, but then a simple

Code: Select all

telnet 185.11.240.13 80

is timing out.

It's working normally through the SOCKS proxy though.

[Diziet Sma]

Can anyone from France confirm this? (LOL, if I am right, they cannot even see this)

When I connect via the PIA VPN server in France, I can still access the forum with no problems.

Since I only use hotel wifis, maybe they are blocking it, however, why should they?

Sometimes admins will block entire blocks of IP addresses, rather than specific problematic IPs, so it's very possible that the forum IP has been inadvertently blocked for some unrelated issue. Some firewalls can auto-block IPs that demonstrate hostile behaviour. If auto-blocking restricts IP blocks, rather than individual IPs, then innocent websites could also be blocked.

It seems that some firewall is dropping the IP traffic, because I need to wait my 5min for the timeout.

That would seem to confirm my suspicions above.

If you only use hotel wifi, it might be worthwhile signing up to a VPN service (much better than a SOCKS proxy). Not only would that protect your wifi signal from being snooped by others (they could steal logins, hack your laptop, etc), but it would allow you to bypass any restrictions the hotel places on your connection.

[popsch]

Thanks for pointing out that a VPN on a public wifi is a good idea to prevent leaking personal info.

I just find it a pity that the Oolite forum is inaccessible in France due to some random entry in a firewall config that's replicated across the country. During my stay in France, I have now tried to reach the Oolite forums from a number of publicly accessible WiFis, including various hotels, cafes, brasseries, the Paris public wifi, and even Centre Pompidou. All of them block Oolite, except one provided by Luis Vuitton. The site is accessible through the VPN though.

The consequence of this is that some people won't play Oolite, because if the form link is dead, then most answers to questions will be unreachable, because google links to the forum (this is how I originally found out about it).

[Diziet Sma]

Thanks for pointing out that a VPN on a public wifi is a good idea to prevent leaking personal info.

That's something that far too few people know about, IMO. My phone is set to always use my VPN for wifi connections.

I just find it a pity that the Oolite forum is inaccessible in France due to some random entry in a firewall config that's replicated across the country. During my stay in France, I have now tried to reach the Oolite forums from a number of publicly accessible WiFis, including various hotels, cafes, brasseries, the Paris public wifi, and even Centre Pompidou. All of them block Oolite, except one provided by Luis Vuitton. The site is accessible through the VPN though.

I just had another thought in this regard. Another way that innocent sites can get IP blocked, is if, as is very common these days, they are hosted on a shared server. It's not uncommon for cheaper hosting companies to put over 100 websites on the one physical server, all sharing the same IP address, with connections re-routed internally to each site. If one of those sites gets blocked for whatever reason, then all the other sites on the same server will also be blocked.

It turns out that the Oolite forum shares hosting with 8 other sites:

Found 9 domains hosted on the same web server as aegidian.org (185.11.240.13).

aarksncrafts.co.uk, aegidian.org, dunstabledentists.co.uk, harveyglobal.com, radiatorcurving.com, theknollguesthouse.co.uk, wallaceresourcelibrary.com, ozrevenues.com, welshmuseumsfederation.org

They all look pretty harmless to me, although recently at least one of them (ozrevenues) was hacked, so spammers may have been using it as a mail relay for a while, which would definitely be enough to get it blocked. You could try contacting the administrators for one of the hotel's networks and asking it to be un-blocked. A whois lookup will provide the tech-admin contact details.

The oolite website is working, but the bulletin boards are not working

Interestingly enough, the Oolite.org website, which isn't being blocked, shares an IP address with 410 other sites (many of them not active), including at least two (defunct) "explicit content" sites. Such content is another reason IPs sometimes get blocked, although perhaps in France that's not considered a reason to block.. It probably is enough, however, for web filtering software, such as Net Nanny, to block access to the Oolite.org site.

[popsch]

Found 9 domains hosted on the same web server as aegidian.org (185.11.240.13).

aarksncrafts.co.uk, aegidian.org, dunstabledentists.co.uk, harveyglobal.com, radiatorcurving.com, theknollguesthouse.co.uk, wallaceresourcelibrary.com, ozrevenues.com, welshmuseumsfederation.org

It must have something to do with the server. It must have been blacklisted in the past and then individual sites requested to be whitelisted again. These are the sites that are working:

• harveyglobal.com
  radiatorcurving.com
  theknollguesthouse.co.uk
  wallaceresourcelibrary.com

These are not working:

• aegidian.org
  dunstabledentists.co.uk
  ozrevenues.com
  welshmuseumsfederation.org
  aarksncrafts.co.uk

Anyways, it might be a good idea for the owner of aegidian.org to get it unblocked. The problem is I don't know how.

[Diziet Sma]

Anyways, it might be a good idea for the owner of aegidian.org to get it unblocked. The problem is I don't know how.

Ideally, it would help to know which blacklisting services the hotels are subscribed to. Failing that, if you can post a few of the hotel domains that are blocking aegidian.org here, it would be possible to look up & contact their tech admins, who could pass an unblock request along.

[Hijase]

I live in France and I have to wifi plans :

- One from French operator SFR and here's the link to connect : https://hotspot.wifi.sfr.fr

- The other being Bouygues (also a French operator) and here's the link to connect : http://hotspotwifi.bouyguestelecom.fr

For example, only Bouygues allows to play multiplayer games. Yet this forum is inaccessible for days in a row with both these connections.

I travel relatively often, this depending on hotel wifi networks as well. I will report here individually other connecting issues as I find them.

[rhubarb]

I can currently connect OK from France using my domestic Numericable (ISP) service.

I can't say if this is normal because I tend to connect over socks to a server in Amsterdam and I never have any connection problems with that.

I sometimes view the forum read-only through the ixquick (search engine) proxy and in that case I see this kind of warning message:

===
WARNING: The site https://bb.oolite.space/././index.php?sid=1ca44a... may contain malware. Caution is advised if you visit it without the Proxy.
===

I wonder if this has anything to do with it?

This is my traceroute:

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traceroute to aegidian.org (185.11.240.13), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  10.42.192.1 (10.42.192.1)  9.450 ms  9.638 ms  14.582 ms
 2  213-245-252-185.rev.numericable.fr (213.245.252.185)  15.011 ms  15.197 ms  15.370 ms
 3  ip-65.net-80-236-3.static.numericable.fr (80.236.3.65)  33.810 ms  34.459 ms  34.035 ms
 4  be4287.agr21.par01.atlas.cogentco.com (149.6.160.137)  31.542 ms  30.991 ms  31.237 ms
 5  be2044.ccr41.par01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.51.77)  30.454 ms  30.188 ms be2140.ccr42.par01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.51.81)  29.798 ms
 6  be2489.ccr42.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.39.113)  39.800 ms be2497.ccr41.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.39.65)  29.288 ms  31.094 ms
 7  be2178.ccr21.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.50.205)  31.886 ms be2494.ccr22.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.39.129)  31.388 ms  31.592 ms
 8  te0-0-2-2.rcr11.b015592-1.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.51.234)  35.934 ms  32.168 ms  32.485 ms
 9  msols-ltd.demarc.cogentco.com (149.6.146.70)  43.966 ms  44.289 ms  43.667 ms
10  mx01-xe2.0.0-lon.gs.nodefour.net (83.166.164.34)  37.962 ms  41.668 ms  41.401 ms
11  mx02-xe1.2.0-dry.dc2.nodefour.net (83.166.164.38)  41.989 ms  38.442 ms  38.670 ms
12  sw02-h2-ge-0-1-dry.dc2.nodefour.net (83.166.167.254)  40.511 ms  40.146 ms  40.702 ms
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[Hijase]

It seems to be working fine now but for how long? I'll keep you posted.
Starting Friday, I'll be in Germany, thus connecting from whatever Wifi hotspots I can find. I'll keep you guys posted. <3