Hi, for the last few weeks, maybe about a month, I haven’t been able to access the forum from my home network – I get connection timeouts. At first I thought the server is down, but when I visited family in another town I had no problem there. Now I see that I can also access it from my mobile LTE network, and also from a private remote server in a different network.

For the time being I’ve set up an ssh SOCKS proxy forwarding connections to ILF through the server… But that’s not ideal. Is it possible that my network is somehow blocked by the forum server?

You could try clearing your cookies or using another browser?

I looked into your account and the setup. Nothing has changed from before and everything seems fine. It sounds like you may have some issue with your account at home. Have you called your home provider?

It has nothing to do with my forum account or my browser – it doesn’t matter whether I try to access the forum from my desktop, laptop, or smarphone – as long as I’m connected to my home network, the server does not respond. The same when trying to download the forum home page using curl or trying to directly telnet to the server and send HTTP request by hand, the connection never gets established at all. As soon as I switch to the mobile network or use the ssh proxy, all of this works fine, all browsers on all the deviced see the forum, curl downloads the front page, and I can telnet to irishlanguageforum.com no problem.

And it’s not DNS (I wondered whether my ISP just blocks the domain or something like that) – the domain resolves correctly to the correct IP and changing DNS doesn’t help. It’s just later no TCP connection gets established. The connection isn’t rejected either. It just hangs.

So it seems that either my provider for some reason blocks traffic to ILF IP address, or ILF blocks my IP address. Anyway, the problem seems to be with the network setup, not the forum itself.

You asked if your account could have been blocked by the forum server. I checked and it isn't. Good luck finding out what the problem is.

Well, I asked if there’s possibility that my network is somehow blocked by the server ;-).

The website doesn't have up to date security certificates. And that can cause problems with some anti-virus software blocking it, and probably some browsers. And maybe that includes some service providers, I don't know. But the site is perfectly safe.

Go raibh maith ‘ad, a Bhríd.

I've had problems accessing the website a small few times, including for a very brief period, a few minutes ago.

When I tried to enter the website, nothing happened, and then after about 2 minutes, I got an error message that said the following:

"504 Gateway Time-out
The server didn't respond in time."

Once, or maybe twice, the following error message was given:

"Backend webserver unreachable

You:
Browser
Working

Web Applicaton Firewall:
BitNinja
Working

Backend Server:
Host
Error"

But it doesn't happen too often.