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Ask HN: [SOLVED] HN is returning a 503 to my IP. How should I debug this?

3 points by Spakman ↗ HN
EDIT: this page explains all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102

Accessing https://news.ycombinator.com/ from any browser on my local network returns either a 503 error or a blank page. Of course, I can access the site through a proxy (hello).

Curl looks a little strange:

  $ curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com/
  HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented
  Server: nginx
  Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:49:55 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 174
  Connection: close
I can ping it fine:

  $ ping -c 4 news.ycombinator.com
  PING news.ycombinator.com (184.172.10.74) 56(84) bytes of data.
  64 bytes from 184.172.10.74-static.reverse.softlayer.com (184.172.10.74): icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=152 ms
  64 bytes from 184.172.10.74-static.reverse.softlayer.com (184.172.10.74): icmp_seq=2 ttl=50 time=152 ms
  64 bytes from 184.172.10.74-static.reverse.softlayer.com (184.172.10.74): icmp_seq=3 ttl=50 time=144 ms
  64 bytes from 184.172.10.74-static.reverse.softlayer.com (184.172.10.74): icmp_seq=4 ttl=50 time=144 ms
  
  --- news.ycombinator.com ping statistics ---
  4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3003ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 144.188/148.436/152.573/3.952 ms
I'm reaching the limits of my network debugging talent. What can I do next?

9 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] thread
jaachan
I can access HN just fine, but I get the same result from curl:

  $ curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com/ -k
  HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented
  Server: nginx
  Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:59:39 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 174
  Connection: close
You could try doing custom HTTP requests via telnet:

  $ telnet news.ycombinator.com 80
  Trying 184.172.10.74...
  Connected to news.ycombinator.com.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  GET /
  <html>
  <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
  <body bgcolor="white">
  <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
  <hr><center>nginx</center>
  </body>
  </html>
  Connection closed by foreign host.
Since HN redirect everything to HTTPS it doesn't tell you much, but it can tell you for example whether a connection to port 80 is going through.

Edit: You have to type the "GET /" <return> part, in case that wasn't clear. The rest is server response.

Spakman
Thanks. I get exactly the same telnet results as you.

Hmm...

jacquesm
Were you by any chance spidering the site from the same IP?
Spakman
No. I can't think that I was doing anything like that at all. I even subscribe to the RSS feed from a different IP and read that over IMAP!
jacquesm
Sometimes a browser crash and subsequent restore with a lot of HN tabs open will trigger an IP ban.

HN is finicky, hard to know for sure what caused this.